You brought a gun to a swordfight (I brought a bow and arrow)
by Cuits
Summary: They date before even they know they are dating. That doesn't make it less true. What prompt Oliver to ask Felicity out at the beggining of season 3? A behind the scenes, canon compliant look at Felicity and Oliver's relationship along seasons 2 and 3 and headcanon between them.
1. We nver passed the Bechdel Test

In the beginning, there were rumours circling around the company, the club, the city… rumours about her, and/or Oliver, and of every possible context and combination of the aforementioned subjects. Once she became his PA the gossiping only intensified, making the topic a hit at coffee breaks in Queen Consolidated. One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to know that, and Felicity is most certainly neither of those. The funny thing though, is that for all the gossip and speculation about her new work position and all the unwelcome commentary soundtrack that seems to accompany their every movement these days, she is often closer to getting fed up and leaving than to falling in love with Oliver Queen.

"This is absolutely intolerable!" The voice is irritating and rude, and the face that goes with it is red and full of anger.

It's in moments like this when Felicity misses her old IT job the most.

"I'm very, very sorry but as I've already told you Mr. Queen has had a personal emergency and he is no longer in the premises, but I'll gladly reschedule your meeting, of course."

She stands and works around the screen of her tablet, opening the calendar app while ironing the final details of the latest Arrow incursion.

"Listen to me, sweetie—" An accusatory pointed finger appears dangerously close to her nose and if there is something that Felicity likes even less than to be shouted at and bullied, that is to be called " _sweetie_ ". "You better make sure that the next time I come to see Mr. Queen he is here to keep his appointment or so help me God."

She braces her tablet and takes a deep, deep breath before solemnly nodding. She might not be a real secretary but she has played one long enough to know that punching the guy in the face is probably not the way to go. Although nobody said anything against anonymously messing with his online profile and information.

She takes another breath, not as deep as the previous one, and walks towards her desk to retrieve the eye makeup remover that she keeps in the second drawer before heading to Oliver's office.

She doesn't knock, and the room is as quiet and dark as if it were empty.

"How did it go?" Oliver is characteristically standing in the darkest corner, carefully buttoning up his dress shirt while his face is still covered in smudged black makeup that doesn't conceal in the slightest his dumbass, GQ-model, sardonic smile as he keeps talking. "He is not the most charming of our investors but we need his money and I'm certain you are in his good graces."

Felicity's intake of breath is probably audible from miles away and the frustration of the day is going to translate into so much stress-eating that she is afraid there won't be enough triple chocolate ice-cream in the city. "'Not the most charming of our investors' might be the greatest understatement I've ever heard and I'm not really sure anybody that doesn't reside within the inner circle of Hell could ever be in his good graces." She puts the bottle of makeup remover on the surface of his impressive mahogany desk with a loud thud and cracks her neck carefully, trying to relieve some of the tension. "Do you need anything else?"

He takes a giant, swift step and takes the bottle from the desk while smirking at her. There are barely ten inches of air between them and Felicity has absolutely no problem understanding why there are a bunch of websites and boards exclusively dedicated to that insufferable grin.

"Well, you could bring me a coffee."

Felicity would like to either or both, smack the daring smile out of his face or aggressively lick it off. The knowledge that he could probably kill her with his pinkie is not quite enough to even turn the scales.

"I hate you," she says, equal frustration and determination colouring her voice as she clenches her hands into fists and turns around because there are days to not tease her about coffee and then there are days to _definitely_ not tease her about coffee. "I'm gonna go now because although you are not really my boss you are still kind-of-my-boss and I hate you so very much right now that I don't have the time to elaborate because I have to go and teach certain next of kin to Lucifer an anonymous, shaming lesson in social networks security configuration."

Her resolute pace makes her ponytail bounce angrily, her pumps stomping on the ridiculously costly floor at the same rhythm as Oliver laughs not quite quietly at her back.

Sometimes she is so close to being done and fleeing that she has to remind herself of the fact that, in a butterfly effect kind of fashion, her putting up skills have saved the life of a handful of people in this city.

There are also other times. The kind of other times that make her feel like falling in love with Oliver Queen is more a matter of an irremediable _when_ and not so much of a voluntary _if_.

"I know we said it was going to be just some minor recon and we wouldn't need you but something came up," Diggle says in that neutral tone of voice that makes it hard for her to guess is he means that the server is working rather slow or that they have accidentally ignited up the cybernetic apocalypsis.

Felicity looks down at her fluffy, comfortable, bunny slippers and sighs with a chocolate ice-cream stained spoon still in her hand. "Fine. I'll be there in five."

She doesn't really change as much as throws a coat over her hoodie and yoga pants, grabs her laptop and the ice-cream in a silent act of rebellious protest and hails a cab. If the driver suspects she is dramatically underdressed for a night at the Verdant he doesn't comment, and just for that Felicity tips her accordingly.

She drags herself downstairs and takes a look at the damage done on the listening devices management program; nothing that a little time and the right knowledge can't fix.

When the boys come back they are mostly covered in mud, stomping their enormous boots onto the floor and leaving a trail of dirt and a number of guns behind them, Felicity has already finished her job and is watching an episode of The Good Wife on her laptop.

"Are those bunny slippers?" Oliver's voice is has mix of incredulity and amusement in it that Felicity doesn't really apreciate given the circumstances.

"You are wearing black makeup smeared all over your upper face, are you really going to judge my style choices?" she says crossing one foot over the other on the desk for effect.

He does that thing he does sometimes where he tries not to laugh but instead looks at the floor, kind of sighs and then fails miserably and ends up smiling anyway.

"I'm going to hit the shower now," announces Diggs on his way to the bathroom, "and it's going to take a long time before I clean off all this mud so don't expect any hot water left. Neither of you."

The bathroom door closes and Felicity huffs. As if she was planning on taking a shower here when she could take a nice, warm bath as soon as she gets home. She closes her eyes for a moment and rolls her neck. The next thing she knows is that Oliver has peeled out his hood, has quietly come behind her and has started to massage her shoulders because, apparently, it might be a thing vigilantes do, who knows? Vigilantes are weird and she is not planning on protesting anytime soon anyway.

"God, you are good at this," she says under her breath, her stiff muscles melting under the firm pressure of his hands.

"Thank you."

"No, really. If fighting crime doesn't pay off you can always rub people for a living. I mean professionally," she tries to clarify. "Rub people's backs professionally. In exchange for money."

Behind her Oliver snorts and she simply gives up. "Okay that wasn't entirely my fault. It is an easy topic for innuendo. Platonic innuendo."

"I'll remember to tell that to my mother's massage therapist," he says sounding perfectly un-sex-implied-ly and correct.

Felicity throws her head back and opens her eyes, her line of vision perfectly aligned with Oliver's amused one.

"I hate you." But she doesn't. Not at all. He must be tired and still he is taking the time and effort to somehow make up for her coming to the foundry.

Oliver breathes deeply and leans, kissing her on the forehead. "Come on, partner," he says, "I'll drive you home."

And Felicity, in her bunny slippers and yoga pants thinks that yes, it's definitely a matter of _when_.

Diggle is another story altogether. The brother in arms, the stand-by hero, the capable sidekick. Diggle has impressive abs and arms that could support her for the rest of her life and the good boy vibe that the women in her family never fell for.

"Your coffee, girl."

He brings her coffee and waits with her in the background when Oliver Queen makes a big entrance and the photographers become nasty savages to get the best shot.

"My hero," she says from behind her PA desk and he smiles at the hidden pun like nobody else in the entire world could.

He sits noncommittally at the edge of her desk and asks her about her day, about the latest call from her mother or about that book she was reading that had her so excited that she couldn' .up. about it.

Diggle finds the time for the small things, he smiles lightly when he concentrates instead of brooding, and enjoys Belly Burger a little too much, but none of these things make him less of a soldier. He is like the sensible version of a night vigilante, always questioning why they should jump of a building when there is a perfectly nice elevator just there waiting for them to use it. Felicity loves him for that, in a totally platonic way, of course.

"What about that book everybody is reading nowadays?"

"Please don't say—"

"Fifty Shades of… something."

"Arggg!" She tries to consider if this topic of conversation is worth her while for half a second before her inner rage gets the better of her.

"That is a book that should never be brought up in my presence, like EVER!"

Diggs eyes her suspiciously and maybe she is typing way too fast and way too hard. He crosses his impressive arms over his impressive chest in that way that makes him look like a colossus and that sometimes reminds her of that dream she had once— and wow. So not the point.

"Felicity, are you okay?"

"Okay? With that book? No, I'm most definitely not okay." Felicity can talk about these things with Diggle because he didn't spend five years on an island and doesn't look at everybody like every breathing moment that he is not fighting for justice is a waste of time and oxygen. "And I'm gonna tell you why and you are going to regret having brought this book up."

"I'm already regretting it."

Diggle looks at his watch getting up from her desk and she picks up on the gesture without skipping a beat; it's time to go, she gets her tablet and walks around the desk while Oliver gets out from his office.

"It romanticizes abuse! It's an offense to every independent woman of this planet."

"Do I want to know?" asks Oliver as he leads the way to the elevator.

"Not really."

"All I'm just saying is that we are in the business of providing justice, we should burn every copy ever printed of that book. That would be justice." The click of her heels on the impeccable floor just gives her rhythm. "It paints a poor portrayal of victims of trauma as children and is an absolute insult to the BDSM community."

"Did you just say—"

"It just ignores the Sane-Safe-Consensual principle and goes straight to the spanking sex and the ropes."

The elevator door closes and when a couple of second later nobody has pressed any buttons she turns around. What she finds is the very epitome of intrigue, surprise and prudishness painted on the guys' faces. Oh God, has she just spoken to Diggle and Oliver about BDSM?

"What? Don't look at me like that; I used to read a lot." Yes, a whole lot of very instructive fanfiction although she is not going to tell them _that_.

Diggle snorts, remembers that the three of them are inside of an unmoving elevator and presses the button for the garage. "I'm definitely not going to bring up that book ever again."

If Oliver looks far less amused than Diggs and maybe even a little bit flustered, Felicity tells herself that it is just because Diggle is always a different kind of story altogether.

She used to do this too when she worked in the IT department of Queen Consolidated and had had a particularly vexing day: stay late, prepare herself a hot chocolate, take her shoes off and work. It never fails to make her feel a little better, to solve the problems she knows how to solve, efficiently, without unwelcome distractions. And if she thought she had vexing days back then, karma has taken to prove to her how relative things can be — outside of Einstein's theories — since she met Oliver Queen.

She takes her mug and walks barefoot to her station at Arrow when the familiar sound of a metal bar hitting metal dents makes her reconsider her feel-better routine. She had a really bad day, she is already barefoot and with a hot chocolate in her hand, if she were to sit and just stare for a while as Oliver exercises — probably shirtless — instead of refactoring code, could anybody really blame her?

She sits quietly and observes. She watches the muscles of his back and his arms contract and expand in mesmerizing movement, all glistening with sweat — which should be gross but believe her, it's really not — and the taste of chocolate on her lips. She is a little ashamed of herself, truth be told, not by her obvious crush or by the implied objectivization of her partner, her friend, but embarrassed that she fell for such a cliché: tortured, rich, handsome guy with an hero complex. It's like she is fifteen again and reading bad fanfiction on her computer, a little flustered and a little out of breath.

There is a sudden movement and Oliver lets go of the metal bar landing soundly on the mat and looking fixedly in her direction without really seeing her. She strangles the mug between her hands and contains her breathing until he visibly relaxes but keeps staring at her in quite a different way.

"Felicity."

And that's her cue to panic a little and babble a lot.

"You used to have one of those?" She points with a movement of her head to the salmon ladder. "You know, when you were… _not here_." She doesn't say _the island_ because by now she knows that he was also somewhere else, that there is more to the story there than he will ever tell her.

He smiles in that confused way that is not really a smile and raises his eyebrow a quarter of a half of an inch. The second of silence suffocates her.

"I ask because you use that thing more than Diggle uses ketchup and that is saying quite a lot." He is still looking at her and Felicity fills every inch of the hole she feels forming at the bottom of her stomach with as many words as she can summon. "I mean you use it for training, obviously, but is like you climb up that thing whenever you are trying to deal with something. You're angry? Salmon ladder. Frustrated? Salmon ladder. Anxious? Salmon ladder. Your cat dies? Not that you have a cat but if you had one and it died—"

Oliver sighs interrupting her and Felicity breathes for the first time in what feels like a decade or two.

"Your point?" he goes and picks up a towel and dries his face before leaving the thing hanging from his neck. His torso and arms are still glistening under the fluorescent lights and the first thing that comes into her mind is _what a bastard_.

"You can talk to me too. I'm a good listener and an extensive use of the Internet has taught me not to judge." The pregnant pause makes her feel like maybe she has trespassed some kind of limit, like maybe she doesn't have the right to say such a thing to him. "Or not talk at all. God, I mean, not-talking as in having coffee or something, not not-talking as in using the mouth for other purposes."

He tilts his head and she swears, sometimes he enjoys her rantings a little too much not to be a complete jerk.

"The point is, I'm here," she finally says and takes a sip of her not-so-hot-anymore chocolate if only to just shut up.

Oliver nods and still shirtless he takes a few steps and sits on the edge of her station. His arms extended and supporting part of his weight, every single damn muscle showing off in that posture and he is close enough now that Felicity is actually wondering how he can smell so neutral after working out and how in hell is she supposed to be able to relax and concentrate enough to get anything done.

"So how was your day?" asks Oliver which is, admittedly, such a little thing to do and yet Felicity smiles brightly and maybe, maybe, she thinks he is less of a jerk.

"Crappy. My boss is kind of a jerk sometimes."

He doesn't really smile but his knee bumps lightly against her knee and asks in all faked solemnity, "do you want me to kick his ass?"

"No, I think I can handle him."

He looks at the floor and laughs mostly to himself but when he speaks again he looks at her in the eye with an earnest, complacent facial expression.

"Oh, I'm sure you can."

The extremely narrow gap between buildings is far too dark, small and dusty to even begin to mistake it for a comfortable hiding place. There would be barely room for a big dog to lay there but somehow Oliver manages to _accommodate_ the both of them there and she really hopes that the lack of illumination is enough to fool the bad guys since his back is actually blocking the only way in. Although coming to think of it, it is entirely possible for someone to mistake Oliver's back for a brick wall.

Totally possible.

"Do you think we lost—" she begins to whisper.

"Shhh."

The sound of military boots coming and going is distressing and Felicity can't really tell if the effect is due to the guys frantically checking the zone or a just the echo between close walls. Her heartbeat is loud in her ears and the stress combined with the fact that there is literally no place for her to move is making her more and more claustrophobic by the second, her breathing starting to go faster and harder.

Oliver leans infinitesimally towards her, he barely moves because there is no room for it — oh God, no room. She can't breath — but he manages to loosely embrace her somehow as the sound of angry steps still reverberates on the walls.

"Just breath," he murmurs very softly and she closes her eyes in the darkness and tries to breathe as deeply and as silently as her lungs will allow it, letting the air in and out in controlled gulps of air until everything disappears, everything but Oliver's arms around her and his solid presence, and she can pretend there is a whole ton of free space around them.

It strikes her at the most inconvenient moments — this one, for instance — this little stupid crush she sometimes has on him. It strikes her fast and blindingly hard every once in a while, when she can smell him without colognes or artifices; he smells like coming home and she thinks maybe this is what made her trust him before she had any motives to do so, this intangible sensation of being comforted by his presence.

He has always smelt this way to her, always made her feel like this, like that moment right before falling asleep when you feel so warm, safe and relaxed that the world starts to fade.

She breathes in and breathes out as her heartbeat decreases to a normal pace and she realizes that the sound of bad guys looking for them has dissolved into the night.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

Felicity opens her eyes and tries to shake this feeling out of her system. "Yeah, sure. Just remind me not to wear high heels next time we might be chased."

He gets out of the hole in the wall and offers her a hand to walk out of the tiny alley.

"Not a fan of tight spaces?"

"I'm still trying to figure out how you were able to breath in there. As in how was your rib cage physically able to expand."

Oliver laughs with a charming low intensity as they both walk and turn into a main street, Felicity letting the cold air of the night wash this unnamed feeling away.

Sara Lance comes and goes like the Ghost of Christmas Past as Isabel stays to wander around Oliver like a vicious curse.

It was bad enough that Oliver, her friend whose emotional well-being she cares about, made the incredible dumb choice of falling into bed with the incarnation of all pure evil and mistress of hidden agendas, but to be on the receiving end of the consequences was a little too much even for Felicity's particular brand of karma.

Her constant presence and demands were an inconvenience to her real job for Oliver and her entitlement and general rude manners managed to kill-off her good spirits in about five minutes after having set foot in the building. So, in short: it was all Oliver's fault.

"This is all your fault," Felicity hisses as she struggles with the rope that maintains her wrists tied behind her back.

She has been so eager to get out of Isabel's action radius that she has agreed to accompany him to the bank to renegotiate Queen Consolidated's conditions of recapitalization. She should have known better, nothing good ever came from visiting a bank office.

"If you keep doing that your are going to make it worse," says the human muscle wall she is tied to.

"Define worse."

"You'll find out soon enough when the rope starts to cut into your skin."

She groans frustrated and leans back against Oliver's back. "Couldn't they commit crime at night like everybody else?"

Felicity can feel the vibration of his muscles as he snorts and for some obscure reason his amusement only serves to light up her irritation.

"Don't worry, I'm sure the police will take care of the situation smoothly."

She is not worried as much as pissed off. There are a dozen crucial tasks she should be undertaking instead of spending the morning seated on the floor of the bank's manager office, and if she is crossing some mystical, invisible line for worrying about productivity while being taken hostage, she is certainly not in the mood to contemplate it.

Outside the office, one of the robbers-turned-kidnappers shouts at the receiver that he has Oliver Queen and demands a ransom according to his hostage status. Felicity rolls her eyes and sighs.

Again.

There is absolutely no way that Oliver could get them out of this bank with his secret identity intact and if action movies and tv shows have taught her anything is that hostages situations often require a pizza delivery, a negotiator, a convoluted side plot about corruption within law enforcement and time.

She should try to leave her outrage aside and make the most of a pretty crappy situation.

"So, "she says out loud trying to get the attention of the office manager seated and tied up across the room. "Do you think you could cut the interest rate of Queen Consolidated if we compromise to redeem the capital in less time?"

"Are you… are you negotiating? RIGHT NOW?" The guy looks pale like a paper sheet. "Are you INSANE? We could _DIE_ here!"

At her back Oliver takes her hands in his, they are warm and calloused as they usually are which she finds endearing and comforting most of the time, but now it's just another drop in her proverbial full glass of frustration.

"Just relax," he says, as if he were trying to tame a wild animal, "it will be over soon."

The rope around her wrists loosens, giving her some space to move, to rotate her shoulders and change the angle of her punished elbows even if she has to keep her hands at her back to maintain a certain level of hostage appearances.

The delivery boy arrives and she can see through the glass of the office window how the guys with black sky mask throw themselves at the food without even thinking about checking the boxes for bugs.

"God, we're being held hostage by the junior league of Starling's criminals," she comments. "It's kind of humiliating."

"I'm sorry I put you in this position," he says very, very low, almost like the voice of him in her head.

"You didn't." She rest her whole weight against his back purposely. She is suddenly so very exhausted. "But you put me in a position in which Isabel makes my life as miserable as she can and gave her reasons to feel vindicated doing so."

He sighs and shakes his head and she can feel the movement of his muscles and tendons at work. "I'm sorry," he says sounding like he really means it. "I'll fix it."

She doesn't want him to fix it, she just wants for him to _understand_ that she faces consequences too, that she deserves to be _heard_.

"I don't—"

There is a sudden explosion. Artificial smoke filling the place making the air opaque and hard to breath but she doesn't have time to even cough her discomfort before she finds herself thrown against the floor. She finds every inch of herself buried beneath Oliver, pressed, trapped under the incredible heaviness of his body and she wonders if this asphyxiating suffocation is what he feels with the weight of the world over his shoulders.

Felicity meets Barry Allen precisely at the right time: soon enough to ask him for a favor and not too late to save Oliver's life.

She puts on a sundress and bright pink lipstick and goes to meet Barry before he has to catch his train back to Central City. They get milkshakes and walk around the park near the train station with the sun warming their skin and the faint smell of cut grass in the air.

She has almost forgotten that this used to be her life once; soft drinks, easy, mindless conversation and daylight.

"Star Wars or Star Trek?"

"I resent the implications there is any need to choose, Sir."

Barry smiles openly and brightly as only the people who don't guard terrible secrets can do. "A girl that likes to keep her options open. I like that."

Felicity sips from her triple chocolate milkshake and maybe blushes a little.

"Listen, rumor has it that there is going to be a Syfy Movie Marathon at Open Air Cinema this summer, maybe you would like to visit Starling city and go with me?"

"I'd like that very much."

When they sit on a bench their arms and legs bump lightly into each other and they smile awkwardly like a couple of teenagers on their first date.

This is what Felicity has found out about Barry so far: he is nice, easygoing, a cute geek with a sane sense of justice, he is into science and into her. It is a pleasant feeling to be liked for the mere pleasure of one's company and conversation and not for providing much needed computing skills.

"So…," Barry says finally. "I have a train to catch and I should probably get going now. I'll text you. If that's all right."

Felicity nods too quickly to be cool, but that's alright. "I'd love that."

Barry leans in so slowly that Felicity swears she has seen continents moving faster than him. His lips land over hers an eternity or so later and she feels like she has been holding her breath for maybe too long.

It's a chaste, nice kind of kiss. Her lips feel warm as she watches him go and sighs. There is a part of her that knows in that precise moment that Barry and her are never going to be a thing. And not only for the lack of chemistry in that otherwise perfectly nice kiss but because deep inside, in an obscure, infrequently visited corner of her mind she is perfectly aware that Barry and her have one last thing in common: they both care far too much about Oliver's approval and she needs to be a priority not another understanding sidekick.

She enjoys the blue sky over her head, the green grass around her feet and what is left of her milkshake before heading back home. Maybe Barry is not the one for her, but he offers her triple chocolate kisses, afternoons in the park and a companion whom she doesn't have to lie about her nocturne activities, so she refuses to give up the unlikely maybe of them. At least not yet.

After the third appletini and an unfortunate encounter with a tequila shot everything starts to make sense. Well, it all starts to blur and turn around her but also it starts to make perfect sense.

"I am a terrible person," she declares, her words slurred and not as charged with the epic stoicism that she pretended. "I am the worst."

She rest her forehead over her crossed forearms on the table and is vaguely conscious of the stickiness of spilled drinks on her arms' skin.

"Come on, everything will be okay." Digg's voice sounds comforting and patient as he strokes her back. "None of this is your fault."

She thinks she hears country music behind the white noise of other people's conversations and she wonders briefly how the hell did she end up in a country bar and then remembers, that yes, guilt-ridden need for drunkenness demands the closest bar, not the one with the best music.

"Is not my fault," she acknowledges because, well, lightening striking control is not counted among her several, colorful skills. "But here I am crying myself out like it has happened to me instead to my almost, maybe… something. He has family, and friends and here I am, Diggs, like I was the affected part. Like a phony marthyr." A sudden, horrible thought enters her mind. "Like my mom. Oh god, I'm becoming my mom! I'm definitely the worst."

Diggle sighs, or at least she thinks he sighs, it's difficult to tell once her drunken mind decides not to be able to ignore the country music. "Come on, I think you've had enough appletinis for one night." He gently coerces her to sit up and open her eyes. "I'll walk you home, I think the fresh air will make you good."

She thinks the fresh air will make her throw up but whatever, she gets up and lets Diggle ease her into her raincoat and scarf. She loves this scarf, she hopes she doesn't throw up all over it.

Felicity stumbles on her way out of the bar and he offers her a supportive, steady arm to keep walking.

"This is nice", she says as she leans into her friend. "You are nice."

"That's me, nice, old Diggle."

She burrows her face into his open jacket as they walk, he is basically carrying her as she takes one shaky step after another, and she inhales the soothing, clean scent that she has come to associate with him.

She would like to feel not so very stupidly sentimental. She wishes she had someone in her life that would ugly cry with her and offer to share snacks and get wasted over a bottle of expensive scotch instead of the handful of emotionally closeted personality types she has as close friends.

When was the last time she had a girlfriend? Did she ever had a girlfriend? She tries to remember the last time she talked, really talked, to a person that doesn't have genitals on the outside and she isn't able to come up with anything.

"Oh God, my life doesn't pass the Bechdel test!" she says mortified. "I am a feminist disgrace."

Although it's completely possible what actually comes out of her mouth sounds more along the lines of ' _Ima femnishshgashe'_.

"I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about."

She wants to reply with a witty retort about structural patriarchy, but neither her neurons nor her tongue seem particularly participative, so she sighs in a non-conformist, rebellious way and lets Diggle carry her home.

She is used to be around boys. Felicity worked IT, she went to MIT and her mother had a record number of boyfriends coming and going when she was growing up. Being around boys is kind of her default position, yet when Sarah Lance turns out not to be dead after all and joins their secret club of all things vigilante, Felicity feels like a heavy and testosterone-filled weight has been lifted off her shoulders.

But Sarah is elusive and guarded and seems to only be able to relax around Oliver. The two of them fit in a way that is obvious and mysterious and when she observes them training with Diggle, Felicity can't help but feeling like instead of being more integrated in the team now that she is not the only girl, it just evidences that no matter the sexual chromosome, she is the designated outsider. The addition of Roy to the group doesn't prove her wrong.

She decides to make lemonade out of the bitter metaphorical lemon she can taste in the roof of her mouth.

They are no longer the awkward trio that they once were but Oliver and Sarah become a thing, a circumspect and cautious thing as they are, Diggle shifts uncomfortably between training trios and hanging around her land of the geek, Roy broods alone in dark corners and Felicity wonders if they are ever going to become a real team.

It's like they all are suddenly made of eggshells, too afraid of bumping into each other and breaking into a million pieces. They should be more. They should be collectively better.

These are her people now, her chosen family even if they don't quite realize it yet. Which is why the fourth day in a row that Sara uses the salmon ladder of unspoken feelings until she is so out of breath that she falls ungraciously on the mat, Felicity buys an enormous amount of ice cream and two bottles of some fine wine and self-appoints herself as the official welcome-to-this-whatever committee.

"You don't have to do this."

They are in the sitting-room/chill out area of the Verdant basement that apparently nobody but her really uses except to crash down and emergency sleep like the dead.

Sara looks small and fragile with her legs crossed on the sofa and a pint of Caramel Chew Chew ice-cream on her lap as Felicity connects the multimedia hard drive to the screen. Nobody would have suspected that she could kill a bug taking on her appearance at the moment, much less that she could slaughter a small army of well-trained men.

Deceiving looks can be deceiving and all that jazz.

"Are you kidding me? You haven't watched any of the Avengers franchise movies, it's my moral duty as a faithful Comic Con goer to introduce you to the Marvel Eye Candy Movieverse"

Felicity sets up the queue of movies in chronological order, takes a pint of Mint and Chocolate Chips ice-cream of her own and sits alongside Sara, close enough to almost bump legs.

At some point, between the second glass of wine and Obadiah Stane revealing his betrayal, Sara puts the ice-cream on the floor and interlaces her fingers with such a force that makes her knuckles go white and then Felicity's mind start to rush, her body suddenly rigid and frozen thinking, "Oh my God, OH MY GOD!", cause did she really thought that a movie about  
a tortured superhero was the way to go with a tortured vigilante? It's like forcing a real physicists to watch The Big Bang Theory.

"Are you alright? We can totally change movies, or discard movies altogether—"

But she doesn't get to finish her blabbing.

"You are the one in charge of the security cameras, right?"

Felicity looks at her but Sarah keeps her eyes fixed on the screen, tense, her fingers twisting in a way that is almost painful to see.

"Yes."

"And I take you're also the one that usually looks over the footage."

"Yes."

Sara nods and takes a deep breath, like Felicity knowing that Oliver and her are engaging in the proverbial horizontal tango adds its pound to the heavy weight that Sarah already carries on her shoulders.

She has read more than her fair share of fanfiction to recognize the cliché setup of an angsty romance triangle when she sees one — not that there is any romance involved on her part in this particular scenario.

Felicity would like to explain that impressive abs and biceps aside, she values Oliver's and Diggle's platonic friendship more than she can express with words and that although she is used to it by now, she deeply resents people's assumption that her love for them is only some kind of teenage crush on both or either of them. But the truth is that, as good as Felicity is at babbling and rambling, she is not so good at actual talk.

On the TV Tony Stark is about to start the final battle and the blue-ish light that irradiates from the screen lights their skin matching Sara's look of sorrow.

"I can't even begin to imagine what was like being in that overpopulated desert island of doom, mostly because nobody seems to want to talk about it which is really not the point and it was a mean thing for me to say. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I know what it is to grow up in a family in which you don't feel like you fit, so if you ever want to talk or not to talk or hang out or anything, I know I'm not your sister but I'd like very much to be your friend."

Sara looks at her for the longest part of a minute as if she were trying to figure out if Felicity is going to grow another head in the near future until she smiles the smallest of smiles at her.

"I think I'd like that very much."

Felicity smiles and takes one of Sara's hands in hers in what she hopes translates as a reassuring gesture.

"In case nobody has said as much yet, I'm really glad you're back and still not dead and out of the heartless assassin's business."

Sara's smile broadens and she uses her free hand to re-arrange a lock of Felicity's blonde hair behind her ear. "You are really cute, Felicity Smoak."

And before she has time to process any of this at all, Sara's hand moves from her ear to her nape and their lips are touching.

The kiss is soft, sweet and chaste, and when Sara's pulls away what Felicity sees in her eyes is not desire but a tender gratitude that stays with her. All that she seems to be able to think is "Well… okay," and then she smiles because, yes, this is going to work."

Felicity has a list of every website that might one day be convenient to have access to so on quiet nights like this one, she sits in front of her screens and conscientiously tests their security, sends cleverly disguised trojans and carefully reviews their source code in search of bugs and holes that she could use as her own private backdoor.

She types with conviction at a steady pace and mouths along the lyrics that come out of her headphones as Oliver throws Roy to the mat over and over again at the far end of the lair.

It's a little past midnight when she decides she deserves a break, starts a process that doesn't need her supervision to run smoothly and goes to the fridge for something fresh and sweet to drink, probably one of those bottled starbucks vanilla coffees that she restocks every week even though supposedly nobody else drinks them.

When she goes back the training seems to have stopped too; Oliver is nowhere to be seen and Roy looks beaten and dejected, all flushed up as he drags his steps towards the sofa.

"I'm not sure I fit in all this," he says making an ambiguous gesture with his hand and letting himself drop onto the sofa carelessly.

She should be sympathetic not only because the situation probably calls for it but also because it's kind of her default setting mode, but instead the declaration rubs her in all the wrong ways. Felicity leaves the bottled coffee on the nearest surface and crosses her arms over her chest as restrainedly as she thinks she is able to manage.

"You think you don't fit in all this? _You_?" She is more than a little passive-aggressive but doesn't let her voice rise above a conversational tone. "There are four of you and one of me. You train together and assault buildings ninja-style together while I get to stay here and talk to myself mainly because God forbids that any of you have any idea what I'm talking about. It is like I can't escape the old high school trope, the one with the cool kids and then me being the outsider nerd."

Roy's looks a little astonished for a moment, like her ranting is an unprecedented event, and then very slowly, he starts to smile sideways, the tantalizing mask falling over his features like a curtain.

"I've always considered you one of the cool kids, Felicity."

She briefly wonders if they all practice flirting and charming too between kicks and punches. It only makes her feel even more inadequate and awkward.

"Flattery will get you nowhere with me, mister," she says with the no-nonsense tone she has mastered to get Oliver to disinfect non-life-threatening wounds. Roy's façade falters long enough for her to recognize the soul sucking sadness that peaks in his eyes. She softens, uncrosses her arms and sits beside him on the abused sofa using her normal conciliatory tone. "What's wrong?"

Roy's intake of air is slow and steady but his eyes flare, his jaw sets square and all the muscles of his neck get visibly tense. There is this battle inside of him that is almost painful to watch as the Mirakuru traces in his blood try to get the better of him anytime he gets upset, all that bottled evidently violent energy struggling to come out. Maybe Felicity is too thoughtless for her own good or maybe she has too much faith in his humanity but instead of getting scared she just lets her hand rest over Roy's clenched one in what she hopes is a comforting and encouraging gesture.

"I just—" he grunts instead of ending the sentence. "I don't know."

She doesn't take her hand away instead tries to be patient and doesn't press the issue because Roy's internal turmoil is as obvious as his discomfort trying to put feelings into words, so she just stays there, reachable and approachable to listen to whatever he would like to share whenever he would like to share it. She doesn't expect him to tell her anything of consequence, after all, repressing feelings and salmon ladder exercises are kind of the lair trademark, but she dutifully plays her part.

"I miss Thea," he says surprising them both. "I miss her so much it hurts, but I will not risk injuring her."

Felicity nods solemnly, squeezes his hand and looks him in the eye, hoping that he will be able to see that she is not trying to frivolously appease him.

"It will be okay." She is not sure how or when, but she believes it with the strength of a thousand suns.

"I don't want to hurt any of you either." His voice is about to break and her heart seems to shrink a little bit out of sympathy.

"You won't. We will help you."

They will help him. She has to believe it because they help _people_ everyday so they have to be able to help _their own people_ , they just have to.

Felicity swallows the tears that threaten to fill her eyes and throws her arms around his neck to envelope him in a tight embrace. If Diggle impersonates the role of big brother then Roy has the one of little brother covered just fine.

"Is everything okay?" the sound of Oliver's voice is sudden and startling, — as he usually is — so she jumps a palm in the air in shock — as she usually does — breaking the hug.

"No, no, everything is okay. Peachy. Mostly alright," she says in a blurt walking away to her station instead of staying to see Oliver's eyebrow go up in confused amusement.

She sits back in her chair and busies herself checking all the things that don't need her supervision to calm her nerves. She breathes deeply a couple of times, contemplating her own silliness, she is around Oliver all the time; the concept of him making her nervous should be preposterous but here she is, exposing feelings near such a source of restraint as Oliver doesn't fail to make her feel too weak for this place.

"Hey, Felicity," says Roy and she turns to face the source of the voice in time to see the bottled vanilla coffee rapidly approaching her. She should be ashamed of the pride she feels at catching it before it hits her on the nose. "You are the coolest kid around here."

She is genuinely speechless as Roy goes back to the training mat, the damned bottle of coffee falling undignifiedly from her hands when Oliver stops in front of her giving her a funny look.

"Sure you are all right?"

"Yes, totally." And because she feels this stupid need to fill the silence she continues, "he was just joking." She makes an exaggerated disregarding gesture. "Roy. Joking. He does that sometimes. He doesn't look like he does. But he does. Joke."

Oliver smiles and Felicity rolls her eyes. She is completely ridiculous sometimes. Then Oliver takes another step, leans in and grabbing delicately the side of her neck kiss her on the top of her head.

"No, he is right. You are the coolest kid around here."

Her wound closes nicely. The new, bright, pink skin at the back of her shoulder is soft, thin and itchy, which is only to be expected. Still Sara seems to take special pride on the quick healing and the fact that it may even not leave a scar.

"They key is hydrogen peroxide. Lots and lots of hydrogen peroxide," she says as she corrects the posture of Felicity's feet and urges her to throw a punch. "Povidone-iodine is for sissies," she determines with a little smile.

"Duly noted," Felicity says as she tries to kick the air in front of her in just the exact way Sara has been teaching her to.

"Well done," Sara encourages her. "Remember, the most important thing is for you to create an opportunity to run away."

"Hit and run. Got it."

It's not like Felicity thinks she has any kind of actual chance against any of the opponents this team is used to, but these little exercises and techniques make her feel a little less weak, a little more powerful. "No woman should ever feel at mercy of a man's hand" said Sara once when she first started teaching her self-defense and the quiet ferocity in her voice was enough to convince her she was right.

They have the mat for themselves most of the time since Oliver and Roy have taken to train in derelict buildings after one too many broken pieces of furniture. She ends up completely exhausted, sweaty and feeling soft and weak but it's also a weirdly compelling and rewarding experience.

"I think I like all this girl on girl action," she says taking the bottle of water without thinking too much about how it sounds. She is too tired and too flushed to even blush. "I mean — whatever."

Sara smiles sheepishly as she looks down and Felicity groans and lets herself fall flat to the mat to rest her sore muscles, her breathing still loud and labored. Sara sits near her, her legs crossed Indian style as if waiting patiently for Felicity to catch her breath and the distant, almost inaudible music from the Verdant providing them with soft beats to register the passing of time.

It's nice, it's relaxing, it feels very much like home. Still, Felicity has been around enough time to recognize this for what it is.

"This is the calm before the big storm, right?" she asks Sara looking at the industrial roof. Mirakuru, strange disappearances in the glades… she can read the signs.

Sara sighs loudly and resignedly. "There is always a big storm in the waiting." She says it with the unavoidable gravitas of recited axioms and Felicity rolls around the mat to be able to look at her in the eye. Felicity can see it every time that she looks into Sara's eyes, this dark sadness, this patient wait for the inevitable, ugly, painful drop of the other shoe, and every time, it breaks her heart a little bit.

She stretches her arm and reaches to grab Sara's hand, tries to bring her back from that dark place she never really abandoned. "At least we don't have to wait alone. That's something, right?"

Sara squeezes her hand a little. "That's everything," she says with a low, sweet tone of voice.

Felicity always marvels at her soft delicacy, at the way she can be hard and cruel but her manners, the way she conducts herself most of the time is sweet and vulnerable. A " _fake it till you make it_ " meets " _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ " kind of deal, like a moth reaching blindly to the light that it can't manage to possess.

It scares her a little bit, it scares her what Sara could do that would end up hurting herself but she has no other clue as how to help her so she holds her hand for as long as Sara allows it and hopes against hope that it will be enough.

Diggle's birthday manages to arrive before the metaphorical all-hell-breaking-loose that they are quietly expecting does, so Felicity puts on a big, bright smile and prepares a small party at the foundry, hoping that along the celebration maybe they will all accomplish some team bonding through having fun and alcoholic drinks instead of the usual shared soul-wrecking drama.

It takes all of her blackmail material and she suspects, a little of charm on Sara's side, to get Oliver involved but in the end there's booze, cake, music, booze, little hats that Felicity makes everybody wear, some minor sulking and some more booze.

"This is childish," Oliver says, but everybody is busy filling their glasses one more time and nobody seem to want to pay any attention to his spoilsport assertion; it is only testimony to their diverse states of inebriation that when the fabulous idea of starting to play drinking games comes along, the majority of them don't even think twice before agreeing.

"And I think maybe we have celebrated enough." Oliver's words sound heavy and dense, like they were filled with boredom of doom and completely empty of any kind of meaning for the rest of them. Felicity snorts as she finishes refilling her glass and proceeds to accordingly ignore what he is saying

"Those are big words coming from someone with a little green hat crowning his head." Diggle's words might be a little slurred but still Roy and herself nod as solemnly as they can manage in agreement.

"Not to mention you rather epic drunkenness record." Sara's look of inebriated incredulity is self-explanatory enough.

"Booooooooo," is Felicity's eloquent argument which she emphasizes by grabbing a handful of popcorn and throwing it at his face for good measure. "Besides, you all have nasty bruises from that thing the other day, I'd bet alcohol will help with that. And with everything. We definitely need more alcohol in our collective blood systems."

Roy carefully takes her hand to help her sit on the floor as they all take places and in her drunken stupor that is confirmation enough that this terrible, bad idea is actually going to work on their favor. They all sit in a circle with their backs resting partially or totally in various strategically located pieces of furniture and training devices, the glass with their current drink in one hand and half-empty bottles of alcoholic beverages at an arm's length.

Roy ignores her and consistently looks at some point in the distant, metaphorical horizon while they figure out the logistic needed to start the game. They sit on the floor and rest. They look like a weird star shape in which she is the point located between Diggle and Roy and Oliver and Sara are kind of her opposite.

"Okay, you all have been warned," Oliver says, as if it were his moral obligation to state his superior knowledge of general drunkenness and partying and finally gives up raising his glass above their heads. "Diggle, man. I wouldn't do it for anybody but you," he declares and empties his glass in a single gulp. "Your party, you start."

Diggle laughs and nods and Felicity is probably a little more excited about this than any adult should be. A party full of friends, that has been missing too much of a normal life to be embarrassed by it though. They all have.

Diggle raises his glass and starts the game with a gleeful smile as he proclaims, "Never have I ever had to babysit Oliver Queen," and takes a gulp of his drink accordingly, quickly followed by Sara.

"This is going to be fun!" Felicity says and drinks because really, who hasn't, and laughs out loud.

"I'm way too old to be playing this," murmurs Oliver with a regretful tone of voice but Sara gives him a good humored punch in the shoulder and he keeps playing anyway.

There's a second round and of course there is a third one. There is another round and yet another before Felicity loses count and maybe stops caring about sensible or stupid choices. Their glasses are emptied and refilled, their laughter grows louder and louder until it's Sara's turn again and Diggle really has to go to the bathroom. "Or I might embarrass all of us," he says.

"Some special forces you are," Oliver teases Diggle as he goes and Felicity grabs Roy's steady arm to keep her from losing her balance from so much laughter.

Sara just smiles and raises her glass.

"Shouldn't we wait for him?" Felicity asks a little concerned of starting to count casualties instead of keeping on with the induced booze bonding but Sara doesn't even hesitate. "Never have I ever, kissed or been kissed by a member of Team Arrow," she declares and promptly makes her due shot.

"We don't really call ourselves like that," insists Oliver without much success before drinking.

Roy sighs loudly and relaxes his shoulders, the contentment for staying dry this round written all over his face. Meanwhile, Felicity looks in the general direction of the bathroom waiting for Diggle to appear, mainly because leaving people behind seems like a contradiction of the spirit of the game, but also because she thinks there is a small chance that he might have passed out in a corner somewhere.

She can feel Sara's eyes piercing at her profile, which proves to be a lot more unnerving that she would have anticipated, and takes a breath before drinking and leaving her glass almost empty again. Didn't Diggle left ages ago? She discards her glass to the floor and uses Roy as a prop to get herself to her feet. She is proud to say that she manages to give at least three steady, consecutives steps before the room starts to spin and keeping her balance starts to feel like an impossible task of epic proportions.

Felicity feels like she is going to fall; she is going to drunkenly fall on her face and probably pass out on her way to the floor when out of nowhere Digg's solid hands appear at her waist to steady her up. She grabs at his rock solid figure and waits for a little wave of nausea to pass by.

She thinks she has never been so glad to see him, except maybe all those other times he has prevented her from getting in harm's way. Whatever, she can't really remember.

She can feel how Diggle moves them both, dragging her feet at his imposing pace and only opens back her eyes when she sees they are back in the company of their friends.

"Okay, so what did I miss?" Diggle asks and Felicity lets herself slide down his body till she reaches the floor.

It's not until Oliver answers, "I was asking myself the same question," with his you-have-failed-this-city voice, his confused face and a sudden tension that Felicity can't quite understand, that she starts to suspect that she must have missed something important too.

The metaphorical big storm Felicity was so worried about not only comes but devastates in its passing. In a matter of two weeks, everything that happens is too fast and too violent to let any of them catch their breath and when they win, when they save the city and entrap Slade the taste in the back of their mouths is bitter and angry instead of sweet as triumph should be.

They manage to cure Roy and get rid of the small army of Mirakuru's pet rats but not before they leave a body count, literal and figurative, that could have been far, far more extensive.

Thea leaves the City, Sara too, and Moira Queen is a different kind of gone. Queen Consolidated is in the impossible compromised kind of situation that brokers in Wall Street have ugly, scary nightmares about, and The Glades resemble more a battlefield than any kind of place where families might live and yet… Given the circumstances Felicity chooses to concentrate on counting her blessings, rejoice in their small victories and move on.

"When people come back from an island there's usually some sort of vacation involved and not super secret jail for former super soldier," she complains leaving her backpack on the metallic table of the foundry that had been used, on more than one occasion as a stretcher. "I'm just saying."

She rolls her head trying to liberate some tension from her shoulder. Who would have thought that the day she would actually miss a commercial flight would arrive this soon.

"Not in my kind of island," Oliver answers and Digg snorts as he puts his own bag besides hers.

"Look!" she says pointing at the bare skin of her arm, "I'm not even tan."

Oliver crosses his arm over his chest, his eyebrow so high with incredulity it should be offensive. "You tan?"

"I get slightly sunburned which from a distance can be mistaken as a tan," she explains too quickly. "I still rest my case." She smiles, sits at her chair and rests her head.

Diggle smiles at her and puts a hand on Oliver's shoulder in that way that Felicity imagines feels brotherly and supportive. "I'm gonna go home now and unless the Apocalypse begins again or you want to grab a beer, I don't want to see either of you in the next forty-eight hours." He walks towards the stairs, raising an arm in light warning with his back to them. "I mean it, I have a nice watch with a chronometer and everything."

Felicity closes her eyes and sighs deeply. She is positively drained. She has come to observe that being kidnapped has that kind of effect, at least on her; weird knowledge #28 that she has acquired since partnering up with The Arrow.

"You look tired," Oliver says.

"Believe me, I feel worse."

She feels so exhausted that she doesn't think possible to cross the city to her apartment without taking a ten hour nap first. Suddenly, Oliver strong fingers are on her shoulders and the absolute lack of jumping on her part should be proof enough of her level of weariness.

She should protest, she is after all a little pissed off at him but his hands start to work on the muscles of her shoulders and instead of a smart, resentful comment what escapes her lips is a muffled groan.

He just presses a little harder in response.

The heel of his hand sinks at the exact place while his fingers work on relaxing the base of her neck and she feels like it is too much for it to be fair.

"I am a little mad at you," she says, her voice breaking under her labored breathing.

"Is it because the lack of vacation and the 8 hour flight in that tin can?" His words are low and steady like a lullaby.

"No, although that doesn't speak on your favor either." She aids him reach the tense muscles that run along her nape by stretching her neck forward and keeps her eyes closed. It's easier to concentrate solely on herself that way. "You should have filled me in with the plan before."

 _Before you told me you loved me, before you put a syringe in my hand._

Maybe she is being selfish. They were shot at, punched, kicked, stabbed and all she had to endure was those five seconds of uncertainty between his words and the feeling of the object he was putting in her hand and yet the pain she felt at being used in such a manner was worse than the one she felt when she took that bullet for Sara.

"You have the worst poker face," he says, both their voices are barely more than whispers now, as his hands keep massaging her.

"You used to be so very bad at lying," she says a little bit longingly, a little bit breathy, closer to sleep now than she has been for a while.

"The best lies are the ones that are the closest to the truth."

She doesn't answer that. She is too tired to keep arguing. She feels him lift her in his arms and carry her to the sofa but she can't bring herself to open her eyes, won't bring herself to open them. The last thing she remembers before falling completely asleep is to wonder what can be close to the truth in a lie like "I love you".

She left a flyer for the "First Syfy Movie Marathon" at the Open Air Cinema of Starling City's Park stuck to the crystal wall of the basement because sometimes, she is a little too close to an emotional deprivation disorder diagnosis for her liking.

Felicity knows what she is talking about; she took a semester of Psychology for Dummies 101 back in college, although is pretty possible the course wasn't actually called like that but something slightly more official and classic MIT pretentious. Not that that is near the point. At all.

The point in fact is, that she is used to going to these kind of things alone, she is more than used to, actually, but this year she had expectations of not being alone. She had someone who was willing to go with her, someone who is currently still under a coma and she feels a little bit lonely at the outcome. So, she left the flyer because sometimes she has this feeling that if she doesn't hold her end where the people she cares about are concerned, they will just fade away while she is looking elsewhere and therefore she occasionally does these things; the kind of things that casually say, "hey, it's cool if you want to tag along, it's also cool if you don't feel like it. Please, don't use it as an excuse to leave me". Or at least, that's what she expects that this says.

What she didn't expect when she left the flyer was for any of her vigilante-let's-do-two-hundred-push-ups-for-fun friends to actually attend the event. They are too paranoid, not nerdy enough and there is always so much energy around them that Felicity seriously doubts that any of them could sit still for the whole duration of the marathon. And yet, if she would have had to bet her life on which one of them would be more likely to show up she would never in a thousand years have said that it would be Oliver Queen.

Night is quietly falling on the city. It's not dark enough to see any stars on the sky, not yet anyway, but the light is dim and shadows are long and treacherous. It makes it impossible to distinguish his features from a distance but she'll be damned if she doesn't recognize the way he moves, approaching silently and proficiently avoiding stepping on anybody else's blanket.

"What are you doing here?!" she asks as soon as he is in hearing range and her strained whisper sounds more accusatory than surprised even to her own ears.

He stops suddenly freezing like she imagines he would do if he would happen to stomp into a land mine and Felicity swears to herself that she is going to learn to use the nuances of language any day now. She sure as hell has the brain for it.

"You left that flyer so I though…"

She sighs loudly, probably louder than she just spoke and tries for an apologetic smile. "No, yeah, sure, of course—" she interrupts. "What I meant is, _what are you doing here?_ " She tries to add miming by intonating every word but the tragic outcome is that the sentence ends up sounding exactly the same but slower, as in slightly retarded not in cinematic slow motion. She shrugs and makes a dismissive movement with her hand. "Urg. You know what I mean."

Oliver is just at the border of her picnic blanket as if waiting for a formal invitation to come in, which is not only probably unheard of, but pretty absurd too. He is wearing a long sleeve t shirt that probably costs more than her monthly rent, the fabric clinging to his shoulders and chest as he stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his ridiculously expensive designer jeans, and an honest to god baseball cap.

"Are you wearing a baseball cap?"

He even seem a little embarrassed at himself for a moment before smiling tightly and gesturing towards the blanket. "May I join you?"

Felicity blinks once, twice even."You know this is a Syfy Marathon, right?" she says moving aside to make space for him. "You actually read all the words in the flyer."

Oliver smiles more broadly, or at least she has a feeling he does because darkness has finally settled in around them and the light from the distant lamp posts is not enough for her to distinguish his features until he takes that step and sits on the blanket by her side.

"I've been known to be able to read, yes." Felicity shakes her head slightly, her ponytail bouncing at the movement as she recognizes the familiar feeling of social embarrassment.

"It's a slow night. Diggle has gone home and Roy is on patrol. I thought we could hang out."

Felicity is about to point out that they never hang out. Not really. Not like this, just the two of them alone in casual clothes, doing something mundane and normal that doesn't involve work, playing bait, or some sort of surveillance, but that's the moment the screen comes to life in front of them and a blue glow immediately covers all the audience and she decides to enjoy the movie now and asks the questions later.

She has watched this movie at least a zillion times but she is caught up in the story nevertheless, as soon as the first scene ends she forgets about her job and her other job, the rent — she even forgets about the park and the other people, as if she were suspended in time and space. There is just her and these characters she knows and loves.

"Are we good?"

And apparently, Oliver too. His voice comes to her almost like a noise, an unwelcome disruption she can't ignore but can't quite pay attention to either.

"Uhm?"

"You and me. Are we good? Because you are one of the few people I trust to keep me grounded and to keep me on the right path and I really need for us to be good."

That's the moment when Felicity suddenly loses the track of the movie even though she knows

the argument by heart and she spins her head towards Oliver so fast that it wouldn't be that surprising had she legitimately sprained her neck.

There is something really serious going on the day Oliver Queen chooses to have a conversation about something that could be defined as feelings without a gun pointed at either of their heads.

"Yes, yes. We've had some disagreements, Oliver." She carefully puts her hand over his where it rests on his right knee. "That doesn't mean that I no longer stand by you."

She expects to observe some kind of reassuring expression in his features but instead there is a flicker of something that for a second looks too much like disappointment for Felicity's comfort.

"Oliver? What's going on? You are freaking me out."

The movie is completely forgotten; she keeps her voice low due to the possible secrecy of the matter they are about to discuss instead of for the benefit of their fellow audience members.

Felicity's hold on Oliver's hand tightens as she mentally braces herself for whatever is about to come.

"You didn't mention to me anything about you and Diggle," Oliver says, low and strained like every word were costing him a whole deal of pain.

There is this moment in which her brain stops all conscious thought, just stops, and all she can hear and see is a big, fat, comic-like "WHAAAAT?!" written in the air. She lets go of Oliver's hand but he reacts quickly and interlaces their fingers like the physical grip will make her freak out a little less.

"What exactly should have I mentioned?" Because maybe she is just misinterpreting the whole

thing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time her brain decides to go far beyond the line of duty to get her into an embarrassing mess. For all that she knows, Oliver could be talking about their Big Belly routine or the fact that even though she has solemnly sworn never to bring coffee to Oliver to his office she has been known not to apply such a rigor where Diggle is concerned.

"That you two are… dating?" he finishes the sentence with the interrogative tone that gives the sudden uncertainty over the sense behind what one is saying. Felicity's face must be the very picture of incredulity and Oliver lets his head drop for a moment before taking a deep breath to look at her in the eyes again. "You two aren't dating, are you?"

 _No, Diggle and I are not dating, how the hell did you get to that conclusion?_ That's what she means to say, but instead the words that come out of her mouth are others. "Is this about the coffee?" Her voice sounds a little strangled but in all honestly, she thinks she is managing the situation remarkably well, given that currently she is not completely freaking out. Operative word being 'completely'.

"It is absolutely not about the coffee."

There is a moment of silence and the dialogue of the movie fills the gap between them. It feels surreal, the artificial glow, the warm, nocturne temperature and their stupid fingers are still entangled and what felt innocent and meant for comfort before is like a pink elephant in the room now.

"I don't understand," she whispers because she says it mostly to herself but Oliver hears it nevertheless.

"I shouldn't have said anything." He is looking at the screen now and she breathes deeply as she retrieves her right hand and Oliver quickly shifts his attention and fixes it to the point where her hand was just a moment ago.

"We are as good as we've ever been." She smiles at him but her smile is crooked and doesn't reach her eyes.

"Yeah, right." Oliver looks ahead; he has the kind of resigned determination in his eyes that she has seen thousands of times by now, in very specific scenarios. "I guess we just aren't as close as I thought we were."

He speaks with a quiet sadness that almost breaks her heart, almost but not quite because she is no longer as naïve as to believe that Oliver's words have the same meaning they would have if she had spoken them.

"I need a drink," she says. The marathon is obviously ruined for her anyway and somehow it seems like the adult thing to do.

"Okay," he says. He stands up and smiles his usual I'm-amused-at-you-smile and offers her his hand. "I'll buy you one."

Felicity breathes deeply and takes his hand because this kind of nonchalant Oliver is a territory she has learned to navigate a while ago.

"Round of appletinis!"

They pick up and fold the picnic blanket and Oliver takes her handbag as they walk out of the park.

"I'm not going to drink that."

Oliver offers her his arm and she takes it without thinking too much about it.

"Fine, you can drink caustic soda or whatever it is tough guys like you usually drink."

"Tough guys?"

"Shut up." Felicity shoves him playfully and it feels like the force is balanced in the universe once again, the whole lot of summer ahead of them to figure everything else out.


	2. Slow and Steady (wins the race)

There is this thing that he has come to think of as the survivor's rush. You make yourself ready to die, you fight accepting that the most probable outcome is your death and so, when you come out of it alive, the euphoria of beating the odds is like the highest high from a designer drug. This exhilaration is your biggest, worst enemy. This rapture makes you trusting, gullible, an easy target for a lesser enemy. Oliver knows this because he has experienced it on far more occasions that he cares to count.

He sees it in the team's faces the day after coming back from incarcerating Slade, that utter and careless joy, and his blood freezes in his veins from the cold fear of what could strike next while they are not paying attention.

The nights are the worst part. For a week he almost doesn't sleep, spends the hours patrolling the Glades, passing constantly in front of Felicity's house and Diggle's apartment, on alert, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It takes Oliver nearly ten days to break the path of constant vigilance and training and when he does it, he is not even sure what it is that makes him go out of the Verdant's basement and straight to the old Queen Mansion; all that he knows is that the place matches his mood and calms the anxious tension inside himself even if it's only to replace it with sadness.

The house is gloomy and dusty, without a trace of life or color; there are no carpets on the floors or pictures on the walls and the white sheets that cover the expensive furniture look like resting ghosts that don't care to come alive for him.

He walks along the hallways and visits the old rooms trying to remember a time not so long ago where he felt like he had everything he could ever want within this walls. He comes back to the main hall and sits on the sumptuous stairs trying to recognize himself in this place. He can't. There is nothing left of him there now and somehow that makes him feel more alone than he felt the first time he set a foot on Lian Yu.

There is a soft knock on the main door and before Oliver has time to react the door has opened a crack and Felicity's head has appeared through it, her ponytail hanging at a weird angle, surrounded by the shiny sun light from outside, the metaphor so explicit that even Oliver can't help but notice.

"Hello?"

"Felicity?"

"Oh, there you are."

She opens the door enough for her to enter the house and starts to walk towards him. She is still wearing her working formal clothes, pencil skirt and high heels that announce each of her steps at an impressive volume, her hands are hidden behind her back and Oliver stands up and walks to her suspicious of her little smile.

"Is everything okay?" He asks when she comes to a sudden stop a couple of steps in front of him. Oliver tries really, really hard not to think of the last time they were alone in that precise room.

"Happy Birthday!" she exclaims and procures a cupcake with a single lighted candle from behind her back. "I figured you are not in the mood for celebrations with all that has been going on but everybody deserves a birthday cupcake." She presents it to him, her smile barely contained.

"How did you know it was my birthday?"

"I would be a very crappy, fake assistant if I didn't know that."

"And, how did you know I was here?"

"The cameras are still in place and we rewired the video feed, remember? Now, enough with the interrogatory and blow out the candle!" And with that, she gives an honest-to-god, hop.

Her excitement is absolutely contagious. He smiles, a truthful smile he hadn't really thought he still had within himself and reaches for her hands full of cupcake raising them till they are in front of his face and then he blows.

"Yaaaaaaay!" she says when the candle goes out.

"Please, tell me you are not going to sing 'Happy Birthday' to me."

"There is no force in the universe that could stop me from singing it to you."

She starts to sing as she retrieves the candle and Oliver lowers his head, his chin touching his chest but a hidden smile spread across his face as she intones the familiar tune. She exaggerates the high tones and puts on a grumpy face on the lower ones and makes him eat the whole cupcake from a single bite.

"God," he starts before he knows what he is about to say, "you make it seem so easy."

"What?" Felicity smiles that big, bright, easy smile of hers. "Eating chocolate? Cause I have to warn you, I have some serious training on that."

"No. To keep going." He says it because it's his birthday and even though every breath hurts like hell, his mouth still tastes like chocolate and she looks so gloriously unworried that his breathing hurts the most for different reasons. "You always find the way to make it look easy when it's so damn hard."

She takes a step towards him and puts her hand on his cheek, warm and unimposing, and Oliver doesn't remember if her eyes were always this particular shade of blue, if they were always as deep and captivating as he finds them now.

"Oh, Oliver," her voice is soft and caring. "That's why you take care of the arrows and I give the pep talks." She gets on tiptoes and kisses him on the cheek. "We are a team."

"Yes, we are."

Felicity nods and takes a step backwards, then turns and starts to walk to the door. The shadow of her lips and fingers lingers, imprinted on his cheek.

"Team Arrow!" she declares triumphantly.

He smiles, stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his trousers and starts to follow her. "We don't call ourselves _that_."

She smiles devilishly. "Just keep telling that to yourself, pal."

He shakes his head lightly, conceding a small surrender and heads for the way out after her.

There is nothing left for him in this house anyway.

Warm, sunny day of summer after warm, sunny day of summer and the other shoe fails to drop, and Oliver has to adapt to this relatively calmness that he finds rather unsettling. He could get used to it though. Really, really quickly.

He trains with Roy day in and day out. They work on his strength and speed, through boring repetition of the same moves. Oliver can see he is committed to the task but he lacks patience with himself and his own mistakes, and this unforgiveness frustrates him far too easily.

"Focus," Oliver instructs.

"I. Am. Focusing." There is rage and exhaustion trapped in his voice and the next punch Roy  
throws with all his remaining strength is aimless and cumbersome.

Oliver stops the training for a minute and lets Roy catch his breath.

"You have to keep your head in the game. If you center your attention on the mistakes you've made you'll fail to anticipate the next move of your opponent."

Roy shakes his head and smiles sarcastically as if he were asking him to perform an impossible task.

"Search inside yourself, find that thought that makes you grounded and keep it at a safe distance in your mind."

Roy nods and closes his eyes, takes a deep, deep breath and frowns in hard concentration. Roy doesn't mention what he is thinking of but Oliver knows that it must be Thea and he feels the sudden need to grab him from the shoulders and shake him, to demand that he keeps his little sister away from the madness and as far as possible from harm's way. He doesn't do it though, his sister is far away from them right now and if her memory keeps Roy focused then it will make them both some good.

They resume the training fight and Roy performance improves enough to call it a day after an hour.

"Which is yours?" asks Roy. They sit on a bench, shirtless and breathless as they clean the sweat off of their bodies. "Which is the idea that keeps you focused?"

It has been some time since Oliver has consciously thought about that but it is never far from his mind nevertheless; this mix of names and faces, the endless list of comforting touches and loud laughs. "Home," he answers.

Roy nods knowingly and it's a little more telling than either of them are comfortable admitting.

Oliver is not oblivious enough to not notice the path Roy has set himself in, not to realize the similarities the young man sees in their respective lives. It is heartbreaking that anybody would try to emulate him; the suffering he had endured, the wrong he has done. If he could find the words he would tell Roy to look up to someone more deserving than him, to seek guidance in someone who moves uncomfortably in the moral shades of grey, to aspire to be someone more open and less broken than him. But the words get stuck in his throat and Oliver knows he probably wouldn't listen anyway.

"You don't have to do this," Oliver summarizes.

"Yes, I do."

There is a lost intensity in Roy's eyes and Oliver would like to be able to do more for him than just to teach him to survive in battle.

The sudden movement from across the foundry caches both of their attentions in time to watch Felicity appear with their only flowerpot in her hands. The fact it still contains any kind of life form is a total mystery to him.

"Look at you, handsome, you look quite radiant today."

Felicity leaves the pot on the metallic surface of the table. She has a water pulverizer in one hand and it takes Oliver thirty confusing and embarrassing seconds to realize she is actually talking to the common ivy and not to either of them.

There is a light coming from some diffuse point high above that seems to have the only purpose of making Felicity's hair and lipstick look brighter as she slowly moves to accommodate the plant. It is as mesmerizing at it is disconcerting and when he finally takes his eyes away from the weirdly, domestic scene, Roy has a sardonic smile on his face that he is not even trying to conceal.

Oliver doesn't like that particular smile. He gets up and grabs both their shirts throwing Roy's to his chest with enough force as to produce a muffled groan.

"Put your shirt on," he instructs a little annoyed as he puts on his own. "Are you talking to the ivy?" he asks Felicity as he approaches her. She is wearing a blue dress of an intensity that seems impossible to contain that make her skin look even smoother than usual.

"I am indeed," she says with a smile not even looking at him as she carefully uses the pulverizer on the leaves. "There are a whole bunch of respectable blogs that say it gives it confidence."

"Confidence? To do exactly what?"

"To grow!" She says excitedly, like the most basic action a plant can do is reason for exultant celebration and as it sometimes is the case with her, he has a difficult time maintaining a straight face.

He puts his hands in the front pockets of his cargo pants and takes a couple of steps and gets right behind her back. He can see what she is doing over her shoulder and if he steps directly into her space she doesn't act like she notices but just keeps on humidifying the plant.

"I don't think it needs you to talk to it to accomplish that," he says, his pitch a little lower, his hands still in his pockets so as to not make any physical contact despite the closeness. "I'm pretty sure it only needs water."

"Don't listen to him, he is only jealous because green suits you better," she says to the ivy but he can hear the teasing in her voice and can suspect the falsely unaware smile on her face.

There is a loud cough behind them and when he turns to look around, Roy not only has his shirt on but also his red hoody, he has crossed his arms over his chest and is currently sporting a feigned innocent look that wouldn't fool even a blind man.

"It is almost nine o'clock," he says as an explanation.

Nine o'clock. Upside, the Verdant is about to open its doors and with Thea out of the picture the everyday charade of the big brother in charge casually passing by to check on his little sister's business, is about to begin as well.

He takes a step back and sighs as Felicity seems to continue engrossed on her plant fostering activities.

"Do you want to come up with me?" he asks Roy. "I'm a little rusty with my people's charm."

"Rusty?" Roy seems all too amused by that. "As in implying you have any?"

"Excuse you, I used to be a very successful socialite."

"And I used to wear diapers. But that sure was a long time ago."

They head for the stairs and as they make their way to the club, another warm, sunny day of summer has gone by without incident.

He should be wary, cautious, he should be better trained than to let himself believe that this truce can last but there is a common ivy plant growing in his lair and a strange brightness lightening up its hidden corners and there is a longing part of him that can't help but think that maybe the rest of his life could resemble something like this .

To say anything other but that Oliver was upset could be considered by consensus of a very high percentage of the human population an outrageous lie.

"I'm not upset," he says nevertheless, making a tactical pause between the second and the third word. But still, he grits his teeth as he throws another punch at Diggle that he expectedly dodges.

"Whatever, man." Diggs kicks, turns around and throws a sideway punch that almost hits his solar plexus. "Then I guess you have a secret, good reason for being a dick about all this."

Oliver turns, flexes his left leg and sweeps him over with his right one making Diggs land flat on his back. "I do," he says. Two words, two syllables, three letters that burn the walls of his throat as he walks to the edge of the mat to grab a towel. Lies stacking up heavily in his gut as he speaks. "A very good reason," he says for good measurement.

There is this odd vibrant energy that clutches around his stomach and tenses all the voluntary muscles of his body. He can feel it as he dries the sweat off of his skin, as he walks to the far end of the room, to the darkened bench. It's not a new feeling, he has been unmistakably angrily frustrated before; he recognizes the need to throw a loud tantrum and also the unreasonable  
vindication of all his moody retorts but he is no longer the spoiled brat that would simply give in to his temper and leave his credit card to deal with the consequences.

"Come on, man, it's just a High School reunion. And Felicity says you have to go."

He takes a seat on the bench with his eyes closed and his back to the wall, the towel loosely hanging around his neck as Diggle collects the utilities they have been using.

"It is not _just_ a High School reunion." He understand the need to be seen, to share drinks with the rich and powerful to gain social gravitas if he wants to aspire to being CEO of Queen Consolidated again, but he is not naive enough as to not to know what will be going underneath the surface. "There will be several names uncrossed on my father's notebook attending that party. There will be drugs, alcohol and at some point, some place, probably underage sex. I know who these people are. Hard evidence or not." It sickens him to spend the night among them and do nothing, among these depraved, immoral, cruel people that hide behind an army of lawyers and break the law just barely so that they can't be processed.

His hands become fists at his sides, breathing in and out in at a deliberately slow pace, expanding his lungs, concentrating on the feeling of his own pulse drumming in his ears, trying against hope to get rid of the uncomfortable prickle under his skin, to calm himself to a reasonable level.

"You should ask Felicity to go with you," says Diggle out of thin air. "I'm sure that would the experience more bearable to you."

Oliver opens his eyes and glares at him as threateningly as he can muster.

"Well, unless you still believe we are secretly dating or something," concludes his friend, his smile so insufferably smug that he feels like punching him in the face and hiding under a rock all at the same time. Diggle seems to think the situation is appropriate enough to actually laugh out loud.

"I don't think it's funny."

"I can see your face. Trust me, it's hilarious."

Outside it has started raining. It's one of those cold days of summer when the sky is gray and the sudden chill freezes you to the bones. Oliver thinks it rather suits his mood.

Diggle sighs audible enough for it to echo in the mostly empty walls. He seems to be done laughing which Oliver is immensely grateful for and is now approaching him with an amiable attitude and open hands.

"Come on, I'll buy you a beer," he says putting his hand on his shoulder. "I've already talked to Felicity earlier and she will come later. She has to receive some delivery or another.

Slade has done substantial damage in The glades and the foundry has not been an exception. Felicity has taken to refurbish it according to all their needs which apparently required an intricate plan of chained deliveries in order to maintain their secret a secret.

Oliver shakes slightly his head and accepts Diggle's offer implicitly when he gets up and follows his friend to the improvised locker room Felicity has set for them until the remodeling is finished.

The pub is half crowded when they arrive. It's an old-style kind of place with lots of dark wood and years of dust over the ornamental surfaces but the environment is calm and relaxed and Oliver wonders if he will be able to talk Diggle into play darts with him.

Diggle briefly greets a couple of guys and they manage to secure one of the last free booths before their drinks arrive.

"So… how do you know this place?"

"The owner used to be in the army," Diggle explains. "We come here from time to time when the Big Belly is closed."

Oliver doesn't' really need to ask to whom he is refering with that royal "we" so he sips from his beer and nods, acknowledging the information and trying not to analyze too much why it almost bothers him that he would surely be the only member of the team that didn't know this place.

Twenty minutes later the place is fully packed and they are already on their second round when Diggle asks the bartender for an appletini. Almost as if on cue five minutes after, Felicity appears out of the crowd with her glasses partially fogged and her raincoat buttoned all the way up.

"I'm so sorry, Diggle," she says when she reaches their booth, and starts to take her raincoat off. "The inventory at the Verdant took FOREVER and then the guy with the deliveries called to say that traffic was terrible and he wasn't going to be able to make it after I stood there for an hour. Waiting. While it rained. And then the bus—" Felicity leaves her red garment and her bag and lets herself sink in the cushion of the booth, the appletini already waiting for her on the table. "—God the bus was a MESS, with the traffic and all those people and the umbrellas and—" And then she takes off her glasses to clean them with the hem of her skirt when she seems to notice him for the first time.

Oliver wonders when his presence at a bar became such an unprecedented event as to render someone as Felicity almost speechless. It used to be the other way around not so long ago.

"Hi," says Oliver and because it feels like he has to explain himself he adds, "Diggle invited me. I hope it's okay."

"Yeah, sure, of course. I mean why wouldn't it be? Yeah, it's great. Yes, that's it. Great."

She sighs like she is absolutely disappointed in her articulated speech capabilities and sips from her drink, sinking a little further into the old cushions.

"So, if you two are done being weird I have something to tell you." Diggle smiles brightly and amused as they both look at him expectantly. "I'm going to be a father."

"Oh my God, Diggs! I'm so happy for you!" she gets up and throws herself at him, embracing as much of him as her arms can manage and almost bumps the table in the process. "Cause we are happy about this, right?" she asks just in case, and Oliver can't help but smile at the clean, smooth way in which she manages to sound supportive and nonjudgmental with so few words.

"Yes, very happy."

Felicity hugs him for a couple more seconds and kisses him lightly on the cheek before reclaiming her seat. It is in fact, quite a heartwarming scene.

"Congratulations, Man." Oliver's hug is brief in comparison but his smile and the affection behind the pat on the other man's back are just as genuine. "You are going to be a great father."

"Well, I've had training. I've been babysitting you for two years and as far as I know babies don't come with arch-enemies so there's that."

Felicity snorts and Oliver chooses to go with the joke and laughs at it. And then, Felicity finishes the remains of her appletini in just a couple of gulps which makes him open his eyes a little wider in disbelief and orders another round to make a proper toast.

"You can't make a proper toast if you have already drink from your glass," she declares solemnly. "Those are the rules of toasting."

"I think you just made that up to get us drunk." Diggle says.

"It definitely sounds like something I would have said to get someone drunk." Oliver follows up, not that he is particularly proud of it.

It doesn't matter; she doesn't seem to pay them any attention as the bartender brings them their drinks and the celebratory toasts start to fly around the table. It all feels nice and functional; like they were just an ordinary group of casual friends instead of the kind of friends that usually relate to each other through different levels of complex justice/revenge routines and personal drama.

He has been missing this kind of normal more than he is ready to admit.

One toast leads to another and to yet another one. Under Felicity's rules they are all far into their fourth or fifth drink and the laughter and loud conversations around them have dissolved into white noise. Diggle's smile is so contagious that Oliver finds himself smiling too everytime he speaks at him and as the noise gets louder, his friend get closer to speak to him, his speech quick and easy going and his breath smelling faintly like beer. If he would have had to bet, he would bet that Diggle is actually starting to feel the consequences of his last beer.

"You'd make cute boyfriends," says suddenly Felicity out of thin air. Her words a little slurred and her cheeks show a bright blush that has more to do with alcohol than with embarrassment. "Like in Brokeback Mountain but with less flannel, far more abs and a salmon ladder instead of sheeps."

Diggle stops mid-sentence and looks at her suspiciously, like maybe he is not entirely sure of what he has just heard and although Oliver himself feels terribly self-conscious now as he struggles to keep his hand on his friend's shoulder. He likes to think that he has lived, seen and done enough in these past years as to not be that affected by passing comments on his sexuality.

Diggle looks back at him very seriously but his gaze is a little less sharp than usual and puts his own hand over Oliver's shoulder. "I believe that was our cue to go home. Separately."

Felicity giggles and the sounds seems to fill in the entire place. He helps her put on her jacket as Diggle sets the check and when the three of them step out of the pub the cold air that hits him on the face is refreshing and makes him all the more aware of the warm presence of Felicity at his side.

"Okay guys, my house is not far from here so I'm gonna just take a walk there."

"I'll walk with you," he says a little bit too quickly to sound all that casual.

She is about to argue with him, he knows her well enough to recognize the slight furrow in her forehead and the purse of her lips. He is already prepared to feed her a bunch of mildly good reasons why him walking her home is actually the best way to proceed under the present circumstances when he puts his hand on the small of her back and pushes lightly for her to start to walk and she sighs and seems to forgets that she was about to start argument .

It has stopped raining at some point while they were inside the club, but streets are still wet and full of puddles of water and the air smells like rain.

"So this is what you and Diggle do?"

"Sometimes. Well, there are usually less paternity announcements and more bickering about Janice, from accounting."

Oliver frowns and almost smiles. "What is wrong with Janice from accounting?"

"Trust me, you don't wanna know."

They stroll the streets in silence for a few minutes and his hand leaves the small of her back in favor of offering her his arm which she seems to appreciate as Felicity puts both her hands around his forearm and leans into him, probably with the double intention to keep herself warm and to keep herself from losing her balance.

"You smell nice," she says. "Not that you don't smell nice normally but you smell fancy nice?

He really can't help himself. "Fancy nice?"

"Yeah, you know, not normal nice or sweaty nice but… fancy nice."

He smiles and when she shivers he unzip his jacket, opens it and maneuvers themselves so that Felicity leans over his chest and he can shelter her a little bit with his jacket.

"Better?" he asks.

Felicity giggles and rubs lightly her her cheek against his shirt. "Definitely."

Better indeed. There is something in the unapologetic way in which she seems to appreciate him that always gets to Oliver, that draws him to her, that goes far beyond the flattery of his ego. He likes her in ways he has never liked anybody before, in the inexplicable way in which she manages to make him smile when he has no obvious reason to do so, or the way she uncomplicatedly treats him as a whole person and not the broken fragments of two different identities forced to converge.

"Diggle hasn't explicitly mention but I assumed…Lyla?"

"Yep."

She yawns and Oliver wonders if she is going to fall asleep on him while walking down the street. She clings tiredly with her arms around his waist.

"I didn't know they had that kind of relationship."

"It's kind of complicated. They just have to figure some things out. Vigilante and secret military agent things."

"Right."

They arrive to her house sooner than he expected. She looks for the keys in her bag for about seven straight minutes before finding them and Felicity's little cry of triumph is probably too cute for both their sakes.

"Thank you for walking me home," she says shivering from the sudden rush of cold. "You are my true hero."

She says it teasingly like is meant as a half hearted joke but it warms up something inside of him.

"My pleasure."

Without much a general warning she gets on her tiptoes and kisses him lightly in what he supposes was intended as the general area of his cheek but ends up being the corner of his mouth.

"Goodnight, Oliver," she says the words in a rush, probably trying to cover the embarrassment for the drunken miscalculation and gets inside the house after some minor disagreements with the lock of her door.

The night is still chilly but the clouds in the sky are already disappearing letting the moon shine shyly. As Oliver walks to his motorbike with his hands buried deep in the front pockets of his trousers, he can feel the phantom warmth of Felicity's body against him.

The dream is so vivid than when he wakes up in the lair the humid smell of the island still fills his nostrils and his skin still feels the slow burn of the unforgiving sun.

He can recall every little detail of the dream, every feeling, every emotion and he tries to remember if it was always like this for him or if the ability to dream and remember with detailed accuracy is some unexpected side effect of his training, of any of the many things his body and mind had to undergo on those long five years he wasn't in Starling City.

Maybe dreaming was always like this for him but the almost permanent hangover that was his teens and youthful years acted like a prophylaxis for nightmares.

Sometimes he has nightmares about the Island, about China, about Russia… and it's like he never escaped that world, like the things he did and the things he saw crawled under his skin and he can't shake them off, like a million pins leaving him raw and hurting from within.

Sometimes his mother gets killed over and over again. Sometimes it's Tommy. Sometimes his father. Sometimes the world is still turned upside down and the city burns to its foundations once again; there is rubble covering every possible exit route, the corpses and the injured pile up on the streets just like they did a couple of years ago after the earthquake of The Glades and just as then, the survivors in his dreams struggle to get to their feet and pick up the broken pieces of themselves without him being able to do anything to help.

But more and more often he has been having these other dreams now, the ones where Diggle buys him a drink or Roy mocks him at his better efforts to cook a half decent meal. Of Thea endlessly laughing at any random stupid thing he might have said. He dreams of Felicity, of her voice in his ear and her calming blue eyes indulgently looking at him, and for as long as the effect of the dream lasts Oliver feels like any other normal person, like there is nothing unfixable within himself.

He sits up in his cot and takes a look around the place, at the weapons and the emergency supplies that evidence just how very far from average he his until his eyes catch a glimpse of something green and alive growing up in a pot and he breathes deeply and tries to fall asleep again, hoping that the next time he wakes up, the feeling that will linger won't be the one of hard, merciless dirt surrounding him but of the touch of soft skin under his hands.

Mourning is an odd process that doesn't obey to established paths or deadlines. Oliver sits on a bench of the local cemetery and ponders on the heavy weight that presses on his chest every time he inhales and his lungs fill with air.

How much blame does he get to shoulder for the many people buried here recently? Would it have been more or less if he had never made it back?

He usually doesn't let exhaustion or guilt render him inactive or discouraged in his crusade, but there are moments on slow days in which considering them seems like his only choice. Is he making more harm than good? If he manages to save a hundred instead of a dozen, does it really matter to the loved ones of those he doesn't manage to save? Was the death of Tommy worth the lives he saved that night? The death of Shado? His mother's? Does he even accomplish anything anymore?

Some days he can't remember what it felt like not to have lost so many people. Some days he wonders if he has lost the ability to mourn his loved ones or if he just has been in constant mourning for the last five years, stringing together the loss and the grief since his father took his own life right in front of his eyes to give Oliver a chance at survival.

Did he properly mourn Shado, murdered for his inaction? Or Sara, when he first lost her to the sea so long ago? Even Laurel. Sometimes Oliver thinks he is been mourning the loss of Laurel from the very moment he met her, always terrified that she would discover she loved a person that didn't really exists as he felt her slipping through his fingers.

He gets up and takes a deep breath before leaving some fresh flowers by his mother's tombstone.

"I'm sorry, Mom," he says barely audible. It's been a month and he knows there is nothing left for him to do for her. "Goodbye."

Diggle is waiting for him by his motorbike when he makes it back to the parking spot. He has his arms crossed over his chest and that characteristic Diggle face that says that he knows what it is that's going on.

"You know you haven't been my bodyguard for ages, right?"

"Look at you, throwing back bad jokes at me and everything," he says.

He waits till he is near enough and when he is, Diggle pulls him into a brief strong embrace and then grabs him by the forearm.

"Look, I know it's been just a month. I've lost family too so I know a little of what is going on and I thought today would be a good day to tell you."

Oliver takes a deep breath and braces himself to fake some degree of comfort for his friend's sake, after he says whatever he has come to say.

"Okay, I'm listening."

Diggle smiles a little, like he had already accomplished the hard part and stops grabbing his forearm to put his hands in his pockets.

"So, I was babysitting for A.J. some time ago and he told me about this website board or something about The Arrow. He said it was a site where people mainly whined about their problems and asked for help from The Arrow, so I told Felicity and she has been checking it out in case something big would show up. So one day this kid puts this message about how this bully is terrifying the kids in his class and he is asking The Arrow to help and then someone answers him 'You don't need The Arrow for that, I'm a cop in that district, I'll help you out'. The next week there's an old lady complaining that her landlord is trying to evict her and someone else answers 'You don't need The Arrow for that, I'm a lawyer, I'll help you'. And this has been going on for almost three months now. Strangers helping other strangers just because they can. So, I know there are days when it seems that we are not accomplishing much, but believe me, we are making a difference and, isn't it what all this is about?"

There is a slightly smug smile on Digg's face but it doesn't matter.

"Yes," he says after a deep breath. "I guess it is."

He looks back and gives a last look to the cemetery entry. How much blame does he get to shoulder for the many people buried here recently? Would it have been more or less if he had never made it back? He'll never know for sure, but making a difference is all he can do for those gone people now.

Maybe is not enough, but it's a start.

The mission goes wrong and he is somehow unprepared for the unforeseen turn of events. He manages to push Felicity out of the trajectory of that bullet but she loses her balance and falls out of the balcony and into the pool.

When they arrive back to the foundry he is still in his black suit although his tie has long been forgotten and there is dirt and some blood splatter on his white shirt. She is barefoot and wet; her makeup is ruined her cocktail dress soaked and her blonde hair is slowly starting to dry in messy waves.

"I have to get out of these clothes," she says, she doesn't sound particularly pleased but neither as pissed off as she is entitled to be. She moves trying to reach the zip on her back with just her right arm but she doesn't get to move it. "I kind of pulled some muscle of my left arm. I think I'm gonna need some help with the dress."

He doesn't move. He knows he should be more concerned for her arm, although he checked it before and it didn't look like nothing some rest and painkillers wouldn't fix, instead he is entirely too focused on the way she looks right now, soft and reachable.

"That wasn't one of my common, unintended double entendres, Oliver, I really need you to help me with my clothes."

She looks at him right in the eye and it transfixes him, as if she were able to read his mind, to get an invisible hand inside his chest and squeeze his heart gently until his heartbeat drumming on his ears is all he can hear.

"God, this is so humiliating… You don't even have to _look_ but please, please, take off my clothes."

Yeah, no, looking at her get undressed? Absolutely not the problem. Helping her out of her dress? The motherfucker king of no-problems. Maintaining the cool façade of the platonic, unaffected friend? Yes, Houston? We have a big, fucking problem.

Still, he takes a deep breath and a couple of big steps until he is in front of her, so close he can smell the chlorine of the water but she doesn't break the eye contact and he doesn't know how he could.

"Okay," she murmurs and ever so slowly turns herself around pulling her hair over her right shoulder giving him a perfect view of the zipper and her naked neck.

He raises his hands to the zipper and very slowly starts to pull it down. The skin the dress reveals as it slowly falls open is cool and smooth, moisturized by the extended time wearing the damp cloth and he has to restrain himself from using the full extensión of his palms to caress her back.

When the zipper can't go down any further he retrieves his hands but doesn't step back, doesn't turn around as she pushes the clingy dress down until gives away and falls to her feet.

She turns back to face him with those piercing blue eyes and the charge of the air changes around them. All he can hear is her elaborated breathing, all he can see is black lace on white sky and parted red lips. Oliver doesn't remember ever wanting to kiss anyone as much as he wants to kiss her right now.

"I can't really reach the clasp of my bra either so —"

She doesn't finish her sentence because he kisses her then, hungrily and a little more aggressively than he had previously intended. He attacks her lips with his own, her mouth opening instantly to him and he drowns in the sensation with purpose. His hands automatically going to hold her naked waist and the contact with her skin makes his fingers tremble. She catches hold of his lapels, maybe to keep her balance or maybe to keep him in place as she answers his kiss with a level of assertiveness that should surprise him but doesn't.

They kiss like they are running out of time, messily, passionately, nibbling and sucking until the panting and hard-breathing fills the room, and this is too fast, too much. He tells himself that they should slow things down a little but can't find it in him to put any kind of distance between them.

His hands travel from her waist to the small of her back and then they part ways; one runs up across her back while the other heads south, south, claiming the curvy territory underneath black lace.

She breaks the kiss first. Her hands leaves his jacket to sink her fingers in his hair as her lips move towards his neck.

"If you dare to make a joke about my underwear being wet I'm out of here," she says against his skin.

"Duly noted," he answers but his voice sounds broken and wasted as if he had forgotten how to speak.

He moves them against the closest hard surface which happens to be the pillar by the mat and takes his jacket off with her help. They move frantically to get him out of his many clothes but their hands shake non-cooperatively and all in all, the task proves to be more difficult by their reticence to stops kissing.

"Oh come on! I've seen you change in and out of those damn, tight, leather trousers and hood in the blink of an eye," she protests.

"I'm usually not this distracted," he defends himself as he finishes kicking his trousers off.

He kisses thoroughly the column of her throat and when she groans she pins her carefully against the pillar. He feels the contrast of her cool skin against his own, the wetness of her underwear tattooing itself on his flesh.

His hands runs the sides of her body until they reach lace and then he tears and undoes and moves away to keep touching her skin while her hands seem to be too busy slipping under the elastic of his underwear and grabbing his ass with intent.

"I'm sorry, am I distracting you too much?"

He growls, picks her up and turns them around to let them fall onto the mat. "Don't worry, I plan on keeping focused."

She is on her back and gloriously out of her underwear. He can see the red mark that his beard has left oh the skin of her neck and her cleavage. He looks forward to leave similar marks in other less decorous places.

He starts at her left clavicle, nibbling, and kissing and sucking at her delicate skin as he moves across her cleavage and towards her left breast. She groans, strengthen the grip on his hair and accommodates her thighs around his hips as his tongue gets better acquainted with her nipple.

He is hard and ready against her inner thigh and when her hips push up into his, right after his mouth has started paying due attention to her right breast, he almost forgets that he has set his mind to a mission and his work is not nearly done yet.

He leaves wet, angry, red marks with his mouth under her breast, on her stomach, all across her abdomen, under her navel…

"Oh, God," she pants. Her hands are no longer on his hair but grabbing with force the mat underneath them as he rearranges her thighs over his shoulders.

Her lips are parted and she is looking at him with a glassy, lazy stare that he is sure must be illegal in some states. He can smell her, sweet and heady as he slowly descends upon her and—

He wakes up in his cot with a start and the sheets he barely uses are soaked wet with his sweat.

He incorporates quickly, panting, the dark room spinning around him as he tries to catch his breath. There is a low pitched beat resounding in his ears as a result of his elevated heart rate.

He lets himself fall back to the cot and ignores any other elevated parts of his anatomy.

"Damn," he says to nobody.

And this particular night, the empty foundry agrees with him.

He wakes up in the morning cranky and unsettled after a restless night and hits the shower even before taking a cup of coffee.

The cool water and generic soap wash away the rests of last night's cold sweat but as much as he scratches his skin he can't get rid of the weird frustrating feeling he can't exactly name or pinpoint.

When Diggle descends the stairs to the foundry he has already made his mind to escape as much as possible from these particular four walls that seem to be driving him a particular shade of crazy.

He gets his phone and his wallet and tries to make a quiet exit.

"Where are you going?"

"I have this… thing. Outside. I have to go."

Diggle makes a face that seems half-amused half-completely done with him.

"Seriously, five years of extreme training and nobody thought of teaching you how to come up with believable excuses?"

He shrugs and is out of the place before Diggle will start to ask real question that he wouldn't know how to dodge.

He hits the streets and strolls The Gates under the blue sky, killing as much time as he knows how to. He even entertains the idea of getting his motorbike and driving all the way to Coast City just to see the sea before he remembers he doesn't really like the sea all that much.

When he runs out of places to check and landmarks to avoid he goes back to the Verdant and holds his breath as he takes the steps downstairs.

The place is dark and empty and he exhales at last telling himself that he is being exceedingly silly about the whole situation. He is an adult, he has had wet dreams about people he has been interacting with more times that he cares to count and it has never been this kind of a problem before.

He changes into more comfortable clothes and refuses to contemplate any form of self introspection so he warms his muscles with some basic exercises and hits the salmon ladder.

He breathes deeply, trying to control the rate of his heartbeat while the sound of the metal bar hitting the dents is all that he allows himself to listen to; it resonates in his ears, in his brain. His muscles are sore and protesting but in his mind there is only the next jump, the next dent and nothing more to think about.

"Oh, you're back from wherever!"

Her voice breaks into his absence of conscious thought but still he looks for his focus, finds it and goes up yet another step.

"And hitting the salmon-ladder of conflicted emotions, I see."

She sounds more intrigued than annoyed but her presence is suddenly too much of a distraction, so Oliver sighs and lets go of the metal bar soundly landing on the mat underneath him.

"It's late Felicity, what are you doing here?"

She walks to the bench and grabs a towel before coming back and handing it to him. He is breathless and sweaty, his body wary and alert, and the dim light and late hours make his senses all the more aware of her as she closes the distance.

"It's not that late. I wanted to go over this interminable list of logs tomorrow morning," she says signaling to whatever it's happening in her compute. "Tedious work to distract me from jackasses and the other tedious work."

He smiles, more a reflex than an intentional act. Her hair seems impossibly bright, her eyes made of liquid blue steel and her skin paler than ever. He can even distinguish the different undertones of her perfume while he dries his forehead off.

He closes his eyes for a moment and forces out of his mind the pieces and parts of his dream he hasn't managed to wipe out.

"Can I ask you a question?"

He opens his eyes again and Felicity is leaning in a little into his personal space, as if to protect their conversation from inexistent prying ears, not really waiting for permission to ask . "How on Earth do you get a hold of that bar once you are down here?"

They both look at the bar clenched high in the ladder and Oliver is ready to explain to her that he will climb up one side of the ladder later in order to get it, that jumping from that height with a metal bar in your hands is just an accident waiting to happen but instead he confidentially leans in too, till his lips are mere inches from her ear and the phantom sensation of knowing exactly how her skin would taste like clouds his better judgement.

"Vigilante magic," he whispers.

Her sudden laughter fills the dark and empty spaces of the room and Oliver briefly smiles again and goes back to look for his shirt.

He realizes in that moment that it is not the sex dream what has been upsetting him, but the sudden understanding that she could be not only everything that he needs but also everything he wants; this person that grounds him down with her caring concern, and lifts him up with confident trust, and balances him off with desire.

What he couldn't scrape away on the shower that morning, is the heavy, burdening truth that he doesn't know how to keep safe the things that are most dearest to his heart.

He locates his shirt and puts it on looking with the corner of his eye as she works around her computer and his stomach clenches just by looking at her.

"Damn", he says under his breath.

And once again, the not so empty foundry agrees with him.

The word in the street is that The Arrow has eyes everywhere, but there are only so many working security cameras on The Glades and just 24 hours a day to watch them all. The word in the street is that The Arrow _will know_ if anything happens but the hows and whys are elusive to everyone; sometimes they are elusive even to him. He has learned to pick up the breadcrumb trails and trust that the city will let him know when it needs him.

He climbs the stairs of the watchtower with resolute urgency; all that he knows is that Laurel is upstairs, upset and maybe drinking; Sin was vague about the details when she told Roy.

He is not wearing the hood, there is no need for it now, but he climbs the stairs two at a time and plays the outcome of worst case scenarios in his head all the same.

"Laurel," he says a little out of breath when he reaches the end of the stairs.

She is seated on an old wood box, looking out through an open window. She doesn't even stir when she hears his voice but as he gets closer to her he realizes with relief that the bottle she is nursing between her hands is one of lemon soda.

He picks up another wooden box and checks its structural stability before using it to sit next to her but she just sips from her bottle and keeps looking ahead without so much as acknowledging his presence.

"Laurel?"

She shakes her head lightly and her hair falls like a curtain over her face making it impossible for him to decipher her features anymore.

"Were you really planning on telling me at any point?" she asks with a sad curiosity dripping from her words. "Either of you?"

He takes a deep breath and reaches for her hand but she avoids him with a swift movement. "I want the truth, Oliver. I think I've earned it."

Only the moon and the dim light of the street lamps illuminates the place and it would be really easy to lie about this, to tell her that he was waiting for the right moment, but the truth is that as much as he told her that he thought about telling her every night, he never really had the intention to do so

"No."

Laurel nods and sips from her drink accepting the truth like something that she has seen coming from a distance of ten thousand miles and this quiet disappointment hurts him more than he would have anticipated.

"Did Tommy knew?" Her voice breaks a little as it always does whenever she mentions him and Oliver wonders if it used to be the same when it was him who was dead, if she talked about him with this reverent sadness and pronounced his name as if she was missing a part of herself.

He doubts it. Tommy was always far more deserving than he was. Is. Whatever.

"Yes."

Laurel nods again and silence falls upon them like a comfortable blanket, saving them from the uncomfortable things they still need to tell each other.

"I'm really sorry, Laurel," he says, and he is sure he has said it to her before, but now that she knows that he is The Arrow it seems like it carries new meaning. "I'm sorry about the boat and about Sara and I'm sorry I didn't save Tommy."

It doesn't sound rehearsed, which is strange because he has said this very same words to her a thousand times in his mind.

Laurel smiles at him with a melancholic acceptance that is worse than any angry tantrum she could have thrown at him. Very slowly she leaves her bottle on the floor and puts her hand along the sides of his jaw. "It's okay, Oli. I made peace with those things some time ago. You don't owe me anything anymore. You can't love someone just because you decide so and as much as you wanted to love me, you never really did."

"I love you Laurel, I always have," he protests and it must be true because he remembers focusing on her all those years, he remembers wanting to see her again so much that against all probability, it kept him alive.

" you were never in love with me. You would have never done what you did if you loved me like that. Tommy would have never left me for another woman." He can't argue with her words and the realization makes him feel as lonely as he has ever felt. "You wanted so desperately to become the kind of person that would be in love with a girl like the one I was that you convinced yourself that being my boyfriend would magically do the trick."

They are so close that he could kiss her before thinking about doing it.

"Laurel, I—"

"Don't worry Oliver, I've come to realize the person I was in love with never really existed."

She is the one who closes the distance and kisses him lightly on his left cheek. After that, Laurel picks up her soda from the floor and stands up without losing sight of the city's landscape.

"That's not just your city, Oliver, it's my city too, and I've been working to keep it safe longer than you."

Laurel leaves. She slowly and quietly disappears down the stairs and into the night. Oliver is a little sad and a little surprised that her presence doesn't linger with him. Her absence should be like a heavy weight on his chest, instead of this dull, aching melancholy. He misses the girl she used to be, trusting and too caring for her own good. He misses her truly and deeply, but he can't find her anymore when he looks at Laurel's eyes.

He hurt her so many times before that it shouldn't be surprising that he can't help her achieve the peace she craves, and yet there is a part inside of him that irrevocably breaks when she leaves, that wishes he could make it less painful for the both of them.

Oliver sighs and watches the city ahead of him, silent, crippled and mauled. Waiting for his help, accepting his forgiveness, and that is all that should matter for the time being.

Felicity sets up a list of the most dangerous criminals remaining in Starling City, their own delinquent card deck with a complex system of follow up alarms that allows them to track their every movement and hunt them down one by one, but the city is in recovery, far from the jewel crown it used to be, and consequently the most vicious of its crooks seem to have left for greener pastures.

As it turns out, the most dangerous criminals remaining in Starling City don't constitute much of a challenge these days, which leaves the team with more free time on their hands than they know how to manage.

"You missed a spot," Diggle says, his tone a little too sardonic for his taste but Oliver looks back at the piece of floor he was moping and checks for missed spots anyway.

"Thank you," he says and he hopes that the rigid thickness of his pronunciation makes it clear enough that he is, in fact, not thankful at all.

Cleaning days just make him feel clumsy and unadapted. They are supposed to be easy, basic chores but he has had to remove his shoes after he washed over his shoes twice and stepped on the wet floor like a thousand times. Great eye-hand coordination with a bow and arrow, absolutely nefastus with a mop. Who would have thought.

"Do you know what didn't miss while I was on the Island?" He asks to nobody in particular, "Cleaning."

Diggle snorts as Roy comes out of the bathroom, apron in place and rubber gloves up to his elbows. "Yes, this part of a vigilante's life somehow never made it into the comic books."

"Well, keeping the secret lair a secret means not being able to hire people to do the dirty jobs," argues Felicity almost in a singsong. "But seriously guys, next time there is need to refurbish, glass cabinets are the way to go. Far less dust to dust off than with open shelves."

She wears skinny jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers. She looks like she does in his mind's eye: fresh, unpreoccupied and honest. Oliver moves the mop around himself and manages to trap himself in a small circle of dry floor. He rolls his eyes and sighs deeply.

"Come on guys, it's just a little cleaning. Don't be brats," says Diggle and Roy comes out of the bathroom again more quickly than oliver has ever seen him move, a scouring pad in one hand and a deeply annoyed expression on his face.

"Really? That coming from the guy with the easiest job?"

Diggle pulverizes sanitation liquid over the metallic pallet and looks intently back at Roy. "Do you how hard it is to remove blood stains?"

Oliver tries to take a step but the floor seems wet for miles around him in any direction.

"It is a stained-steel surface so I'm guessing is not that hard!"

Maybe if he uses the mop to pole vault he'd be able to reach a dry surface instead of having to wait or mop the floor all over again. He looks at the mop trying to figure out its consistency and frowns.

"Oliver?" asks Felicity with some hesitation. "Why do you look like an orphan kitten?"

All three pair of eyes are suddenly fixed on him as if trying to figure out what might be wrong with him so he straightens himself and tries to act like he belongs in the very spot he is standing on, with a mop in his hands. "I do not."

"O-kay," she says unsure. "I think we've cleaned enough for the time being."

They all agree with noncommittal eagerness and start to move around, picking up the things they've been using to store them away. Oliver stresses out for a few more moments before the floor finally dries and he is finally free to escape from the imaginary walls of his mopping prison.

It feels weirdly right, this domestic camaraderie among the team and Oliver wonders briefly if this is how normal families look like, bickering and bonding while they do household chores instead of politely getting drunk at social events and hungover-ly avoid each other afterwards.

He checks his phone almost out of reflex but there is no new texts from Thea. He checks when she sent the last one and takes a look at the pictured attached, trying to figure out if there is maybe some detail that would grant him a little more information about his sister's wellbeing.

When he looks up again Felicity is nowhere to be seen and Roy is already heading up the stairs. The foundry is all of a sudden too quiet and the training materials beam and shine too brightly, too clean to be used immediately. There is an advertising flyer in their glass board that wasn't there before and when he gets closer he can see that is for an event at the Starling Museum and Exhibition Center.

It is not an entirely unusual occurrence. Felicity has taken to doing this sometimes, leaving behind these clues-slash-open invitations for events or activities that she will be attending to; a. A way to imposingly imply that she would welcome some company, he guesses, that he finds too adorable for his own good.

He takes the flyer in his hands and only looks up when he hears Diggle approaching. He has changed clothes and is more formally dressed than Oliver expected.

"I'm going out with Lyla," he says buttoning his left cuffing.

"Oh." Oliver wonders for a moment if they plan to meet Felicity at the Museum. "Have fun."

But Diggle looks at the flyer in his hands and smiles in a way that is far more telling than Oliver is comfortable acknowledging. "Yeah. You too." And he knows that his plans most definitely do not include Felicity or him, or any other member of the team for that matter.

He takes a final look at the flyer taking note of the hour of the event and estimates that he has still time to place an strategic call to the head curator of the museum. He may no longer have a fortune to back it up but his name still grants him privileged access to some places every once in a while.

He changes clothes, gets his bike and and makes sure to uncharacteristically arrive at the museum ten minutes before the opening time. He has enough time to pick up the VIP invitations the head curator has secured under his name and wait at the side of the main entrance for Felicity before she gets swallowed by the crowd.

He spots her first. She has changed her informal attire to a less casual dress and the lack of surprise in her face when she sees him is not the only tell that he has been offering her his company more often than not.

He walks to her and pulls her slightly out of the entrance queue. "Come with me," he says, "we have VIP passes." And he doesn't kiss her on the cheek her or greets her with a brief hug because they are not on a date, no matter how much Diggle will think afterwards that it still counts.

They skip the queue and enter the premises where a couple of waiters that probably have more money saved in their bank accounts than he does offer them a flute of champagne.

"VIP passes, uh?" says Felicity getting one of the flutes.

He shrugs. "Somebody owed me a favor."

She takes a sip and smiles over the rim of the glass. "Not too bad for someone who doesn't really know how to clean his own _apartment_ ," she says, the last word with intentional undertone as she makes a metaphorical quote mark with her left hand. "And I'm using the quotation marks and the word apartment in a very liberal way."

"I'm just very… inexperienced in that area." Which is the sad truth. There were the five years of survival, training and crazy missions, and before that he has had always had someone to clean after his mess. In more senses than one.

"Please, don't repeat that sentence when you are not surrounded by privileged people," she says in a rush. "People might punch in the face. Or, you know, try."

They navigate the hallways with the easiness that comes from knowing the territory until they arrive to the main room with the central piece of the exhibition. The painting has never been on Starling City before and the crowd gathers around it like wolves over a prey.

"Wait," he says in a low voice to Felicity and grabs her arm when she tries to enter the small multitude.

She looks at him expectantly but he doesn't explain, doesn't loose his hold on her.

"Oliver, what—?"

"Just wait a minute. Trust me."

Felicity sighs and visibly forces herself to wait as patiently as she can for further instructions. In front of them the security guard checks his watch as oliver knows he will do and starts to urge the group of people to move out to let room for the next group, even though no new people seem to be entering the hall.

"Where are the people?" she asks a little alarmed.

He smiles and releases her arm to put his hand on the small of her back, and guides her forward until they are mere steps away from the painting.

"VIP invitations, remember?" he says in a whisper, leaning towards her ear. "We have ten minutes."

"Alone?" she asks with scandalized delight. Her eyes open wide and bright. "Well, with that guy," she punctuates without looking at the security guard.

"Yes."

She squeals a little in joy before putting her own hand over her mouth. It's completely adorable, this uncontainable expression of joy and his stomach clenches unexpectedly because he can't remember the last time he was able to make someone this unadulteratedly happy. He has a little trouble steadying his breath.

She takes a deep breath and they both stand in front of the painting, side by side, their arms barely touching as Edvard Munch's Eros and Psyche unfolds before their eyes.

Oliver has seen the painting before, back when her mother still managed to drag him to benefit galas and charity events but he doesn't remember the strokes being this colorful; he certainly doesn't remember the raw emotion of contemplating the two outlined figures as they block out the world, watching each other in close intimacy even though they don't have even the intention of touching each other.

There is silence stretching among them, as if only Felicity, the painting and himself existed in that very moment and he knows, _he knows_ how significant this must be to her because Felicity is only this quiet when she is caught up in a big emotion.

His right hand tingles with absence. The colors, the sound of their breathing, the tingling in his hand goes to his brain over and over again until he moves his fingers, just barely, just a couple of inches and they touch the dorse of Felicity's hand and then he freezes.

Colors. Breathing, his fingers touching her skin. Felicity moves her own hand, fast, determined and entangles her fingers with him in a way that makes his whole body relax enough to take a deep, deep breath.

"It's time," says the security guard, and his words, his sudden presence feels violent and annoying to him.

He swallows and looks at his watch distractedly. "Yeah, I think it is."

And maybe, he is not talking about their turn with the painting at all.

He silently positions himself behind her on the mat. He can see the muscles of her back tense and ready under her white tank top and her arms at her sides, hanging too awkwardly to be in a casually calm position.

He advances, not too quickly, and moves to grab her, preparing himself for the impact of her elbow on his solar plexus that he knows it's coming. She flexes her knees and pushes her backside to the back and to one side like he taught her trying to gain space to hit him. She means to move to his side and out of his grasp and then secure his arm long enough to kick him on the knee and run while he's still on the ground, but she hesitates. She doesn't move far enough, and ends up entangling her feet with his own, still in his grasp but now in a very unstable position, and when she actually tries to get free, she ends up losing her balance and falls backwards still holding onto his arm.

He could prevent them from falling, Oliver is all too aware of that, but over and over again he chooses to let Felicity drag him along and for the upteempth time of the evening she lands on her back on the mat with him right over her, his arms breaking the fall at both sides of her shoulders.

"This isn't funny," she says with an indignant tone.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to. Everytime I fall you make that thing with your face like you are trying so hard not to laugh that you have to bite your cheeks to prevent it."

He doesn't want to sound like a condescending asshole but the truth is that every time she starts to fall she tightens her hold on him and screams a very particularly cry of surprise, and then, when she hits the mat, blonde hairs sticking out of her ponytail in every direction, she sighs, and her warm breath touches his lips. He could spend all evening like this and have a pretty great time.

He smiles good-heartedly hoping that it helps to placate her indignación. "Well, it is a little bit funny."

Felicity snorts at that. "I don't see how being thrown onto the mat under you over and over again can be considered fun."

This time he doesn't even try to hide his smirk and she kind of grunts and tries to hide her face but there is no space between them for that because neither of them has moved and they are still lying on the mat as if it were an acceptable position in which to have any kind of platonic conversation.

"I'm not going to dignify that smirk with a blush," she says with resolution.

"You _are_ blushing."

Oliver used to do this all the time before the Queen Gambit; the flirting and the bantering and the insinuations to pretty girls — not the practicing personal defence techniques for fun — was so ingrained in the person he was that some would claim that it was part of his very nature. But afterwards, when everything around him moved as targets or assets in terms of life and death, almost everything that wasn't mission related felt shallow and expendable.

Until now. Until he entered a certain IT office and Felicity was chewing on a red pen.

"Well, let's play World of Warcraft and we'll see who ends up being on top," she says cockily, and then she huffs and puffs and rolls her eyes. "Arggg, you know what I mean."

He laughs and the muscles of his abdomen press lightly against hers.

To banter like this makes him feel like more of a real person and not just a human weapon with a purpose. She makes him feel like all those years before weren't a complete waste of money and oxygen.

"Come on, if you want to end up on top we have to practice more," he says getting up and offering her a hand.

She contemplates him for a moment before taking his hand to help her getting up.

"Oh, I will end up on top one way or the other," she says very, very deliberately with a resolute, daring expression that is hard for him to measure up.

"I have absolutely no doubt."

They take their positions going back to square one, a little better prepared than before.

She brings a bigger pot with a fern this time and Diggle talks to him about a bunch of very obvious things that he didn't know were that blatantly obvious so he takes a chance and goes looking for her after work because he knows he simultaneously can't wait anymore and won't do this ever if he doesn't do it right now.

So he takes a breath and changes the weight of his body from leg to leg trying not to look as anxious as he feels.

"Felicity, would you like to go out to dinner with me?" he asks at last.

"I'm being serious here, Oliver."

"So am I."

And then he proceeds to be as awkward in this conversation as he has never been before in his life. Maybe it is a good sign, an indication that as many times as he has courted women this is an unprecedented kind of date.

He smiles again, takes a quick breath and tries again for the better. "Would you like to go out to dinner with me?"

This time she just says, "Yes," nodding eagerly.

He smiles again and nods too. If the nervous flutter he can feel inside himself is any indication, this won't be just another as dinner dates go.


	3. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Sara's death is like a major natural disaster. Like being dragged around by the gigantic wave of a tsunami, drowning, violently whacking against blunt objects in a messy spiral of pain. Like hitting ground after being lifted up by a tornado.

She sees the simple, wooden coffin containing the lifeless body of Sara being put down into the dirty soil and feels the physical pain of the lost with every intake of air in her lungs. Roy offers her what little comfort he can give but as she emotionally fights and searches a little light ahead to focus on, she can't find any. There is a grey, vast distance between Laurel's devastation and Oliver's composed reaction that nobody seems to inhabit, not even Diggle, and she feels alone there, so, so alone; caught up in between a sister and a hard rock so to speak.

They don't even have the fleeting consolation of grieving in public and before Felicity has a chance to try for closure for the death of her friend, they have Thea to worry about and Merlyn to worry even more so. She can see how the Oliver she knew fades away with every passing day and it adds insult to injury, hurting more than she can articulate with words.

She looks at herself in the mirror in the mornings and barely recognizes herself in the sad, blank stare of the woman she sees there, so she puts on extra bright-red lipstick in a too obvious attempt to overcompensate and marches to work trying not to question her life choices too much as she finds herself alone with Ray in the elevator.

She looks at him from the corner of her eye, this cheery, smiling stranger who has bought a _fucking_ whole company just to put her on a very particular corner and wonders when her life started resembling the teaser of every Criminal Minds episode. There is like a half percent chance that he is a psychopath stalker, what else is new.

The elevator arrives to their floor and she forces a smile and walks to her office and starts to work like a madwoman because it seems like this is the only way in which she can feel like herself, in which she can feel like she has at least a little grasp of control on her own life.

Oliver goes to fight against Ra's al Ghul in spite of all her most reasonable and unreasonable objections and she is left behind with a bunch of shallow, sweet words to wonder and to worry and to balance the so inconvenient grief in between her day job and her night job.

It's extenuating. And with every passing day of Oliver's absence the extenuation grows until she can't really recognize herself anymore. This grey, hard person is not her but she can't seem to be able to find the courage to be who she was once. Not when the city is constantly at stake and there is no one but Team Arrow minus The Arrow to stake a claim.

She hopes against hope, she prays, she even tries to negotiate with the imaginary gods of destiny for Oliver's return but what she gets instead is Malcolm Merlyn and a sword full of dried blood.

"It's Oliver's," he says.

"I don't believe you," she answers, and even when the tests she performs come back positive she squares her jaw, makes fists of her hands and denies the evidence before her eyes.

She refuses to grief for Oliver, refuses to even contemplate the possibility altogether and instead takes care of what she thinks might be his legacy as well as she knows how to. Felicity feels like she doesn't know what she is doing, not by a long shot, but she refuses to acknowledge that too.

She dreams with his return. Constantly. She imagines the scenario of their reunion in almost any conceivable way; the possibilities always playing in the background of her mind no matter how much she tries to focus on anything else and yet when Oliver does come back alive like he promised her he'd do, the experience is nothing like she had envisioned before.

He insists on keeping Thea in the dark, he lectures Laurel, he questions them for the decisions they made under the shadow of his absence and it all proves to be more than she can take. She goes out for blood.

"I don't want to be a woman you love," she says and not so long ago he would have been able to listen to what she doesn't say as well. _I don't want to be lied to, I don't want you to use me as an excuse for your sacrifices, sometimes I wish I didn't love you back._

They are no longer what they almost were once. Not _Oliver and Felicity_ but now simply Oliver and Felicity and is the intangible loss of this shapeless, nameless attachment what finally proves to be too much.

The first time Laurel calls her for a you-have-fail-this-city non-related business, Felicity doesn't quite know what to make of it. They are these two people whose lives touch constantly but don't really mingle.

Laurel doesn't train at the Foundry, she has her own channels of information and their non-existential common past could make of them one of these awkward, social acquaintances that you meet from time to time, the friend of a friend type, the contact in your telephone that never has been used. And yet, they know more secrets about each other's lives than their respectives next of kin which has to count for something, so when Laurel calls, she picks up, when Laurel suggests a milkshake and fries at the Big Belly, Felicity agrees without hesitation and when Sara's absence makes itself present, they both mourn in silent companionship.

Felicity doesn't have that many friends anymore. There is the literal lack of time to socialize and the absolute necessity to lie to everyone about what she does and about what she knows. Not so with Laurel, so trying to get closer to her feels a little bit like just falling into step.

Laurel comes to the Foundry one evening with a fading bruise on the right side of her jaw, looking a little sad and too tired for words so Felicity improvises the proper arrangements before realizing what she is really doing. Maybe she could turn this into some sort of Team Arrow tradition; an introduction to their weird lives, a rite of passage of some sort.

Whatever.

She manages to procure several ice cream flavors, Doritos and an impressive assortment of fruit juices — wine was out of the question — that clearly says something about her passion for snacks and her tendency for stress eating. Felicity looks back over her shoulder to the general direction of the sofa as she finishes connecting the cables to the multimedia hard drive.

"Are you really sure you want to watch this movie, because we can watch anything else." She checks again because, seriously if you haven't been on a forsaken island and you haven't watched The Avengers that's probably because it's as far as it can be from your cup of tea.

Laurel smiles sweetly at her and makes a noncommittal gesture with her hand. "No, it's fine. I've been meaning to watch it because at the very least there is a lot of eye candy in it but I guess life just kept getting in the way."

"Understatement of the year."

They both sit at the worn out sofa at the corner of the basement that almost looks like a sitting room instead of a lab/training room/armory/batcave. They are both in their casual clothes but Laurel's posture is effortlessly impeccable while Felicity looks like someone has dropped her from above and just landed on the sofa gracelessly. They probably look like a model in a magazine cover and the before picture of some seedy advertisement. Felicity sighs internally. They are like opposite sides of a coin: Laurel looks composed and confident where she feels awkward and inopportune, not to mention Laurel's hair, what the hell is going on with all those perfect imperfect waves and is it really possible for it to be so shiny all the time?

On the screen Iron Man flies out of the water as Laurel goes for the caramel chew-chew pint of ice cream. Maybe it's the combination of the similarities or the absence of them, or simply the thought of perfect Lance hair, but the sudden wave of grief for Sara punches her in the stomach and leaves her a little breathless and with a lump of melancholy in her throat.

"Sara and I once watched Iron Man here," she blurts out thoughtlessly and immediately goes for the Doritos, trying to hide her discomfort.

"Really?" Laurel sounds curious and a little shy instead of distressed for the unexpected mention of her dead sister and Felicity can't help but sigh with relief. "Did she liked it?"

"She didn't really say," Felicity mumbles and because she lacks at least five different kinds of filters when it comes to uncomfortable, personal topics of conversation she keeps on talking. "But she kissed me."

Laurel snorts, an honest to God, not composed at all snort that somehow makes Felicity feel a little bit better about this whole fiasco of a situation.

"This would have to be a really, _really_ good movie for me to kiss you."

"Yeah. I usually get the opposite reaction from not-fandom people when they watch Marvel movies with me. They have a tendency to flee, actually."

Laurel laughs, the spoon full of ice-cream halfway to her mouth and it sound like she hasn't laughed for so long that she almost has forgotten how to do it.

"Well, it would have to be a really, _really_ bad movie for me to flee, so there's that."

Laurel smiles indulgently at her and grabs her hand over the worn out tapestry of the sofa. Her fingers are cold from the ice cream but Felicity doesn't mind and they sit in comfortable silence as the plot develops and Chris Hemsworth's biceps take the screen.

"Niiiiice," she murmurs. She should be somehow used to cute guys with ginormous biceps but apparently the lack of real life drama is a decisive factor for her to really appreciate male anatomy.

Laurel just giggles softly and sips from her tangerine juice filled glass.

"Were you two good friends?"

Felicity is so caught up in the movie that her brain needs an extra second to figure out that Laurel is not referring to Robert Downey Jr. and herself but to Sara and herself.

"Yes, yes we were." Or at least that's what Felicity likes to think; that they were friends to the extent that Sara would allow herself to have friends, always too scared to completely open up in case the darkness inside her would spill all over them.

Laurel silently nods and looks contemplative rather than devastated for her loss and Felicity wonders if this is enough to bond, the shared nostalgia for a third person and a common appreciation of the men of Marvel's assets.

"I don't have many friends," Felicity says, "probably because I'm socially awkward at inconvenient times and because of the secret vigilante life thing so I'd like very much if we could hang out. Sometime."

Maybe it's not her most compelling argument but she has been known to misinterpret signals and she is already too much at odds with Oliver to allow herself more room for unsteady grounds.

"Yes," Laurel says with a little smile. "Recovering alcoholics don't usually have a whole lot of friends either. And don't even get me started on the Black Canary stuff."

On the screen Black Widow puts one over on Loki by being smarter and more manipulative than him and Felicity — whose reasons are apparently easy enough for Oliver to disregard — wishes she could develope a fraction of that skill. She doesn't even care to contemplate anymore if that makes her a better of a worse person.

"I just really miss her sometimes," Laurel says, and Felicity comfortingly squeezes her hand. "And I wasted so much time being selfish and mean to her and to Oliver that I don't know, maybe I'm doing it all over again, maybe Oliver is right and I shouldn't be doing this. Maybe I made myself the Black Canary for all the wrong reasons."

Felicity puts the bag of Doritos aside and crosses her legs over the sofa turning slightly to her right to face Laurel instead of the screen.

"Listen to me, Oliver is not always right and sometimes he has the emotional abilities of a pine tree." Felicity holds Laurel's hand with both of hers. "He is not the Black Canary, you are. You don't need his permission or his validation of your motives. You are Laurel Lance and you kick some serious ass."

Laurel's green eyes fill with unshed tears as she gives her a sad smile.

"I just feel so alone sometimes." A tear runs down her bruised cheek and drops on the sofa. "And I've lost so many people in the last years that I can't barely recognize my life for what it used to be. I don't need Oliver's permission but I'd really appreciate having his support."

"He'll come around," she says it with a conviction she didn't know she had.

Laurel let's out a single strangled sob as she starts to cry and Felicity leans over to hug her and pat her lightly on the back.

"Life sucks," Felicity whispers over Laurel's shoulder.

"Yes."

"But you have people who care about you. _We_ care about you. The rest? You're smart, you kick ass, you'll figure it out."

On screen, Coulson dies on a pool of blood and several pints of ice cream melt over the near table.

Life definitely sucks, but she has to believe that they'll figure it out somehow.

Her father left her when she was six years old. This is not a secret although it is an information she doesn't divulgue easily. He left and never came back and when she tells the story (she never tells the whole story, she just speaks of the basic facts), she can usually see the condescending comprehension in other people's eyes.

A little girl from Las Vegas abandoned by her father. What else is new.

This is what she never tells anyone (the whole story, not the basic facts): her father never wanted to leave her, he said so himself to little six-year-old Felicity with tears in his eyes and a suitcase by his side. He left because he loved her (his words not hers), he left because he had to, because there was no other choice.

She believed him but Felicity is no longer six years old and she has come to be of the opinion that there is always another choice, even if it is ugly or painful, there is always another choice.

"I have to go to Nanda Parbat for Merlyn," says Oliver as he takes her hands in his. "This is about Thea. I have no other choice."

There is this look in his eyes, similar to a kicked puppy that begs for her to understand but the pang of pain caused but his words feels too much like betrayal for her to back him up on this.

"You'll do what you think you have to do," she says, trying to be as unsupportive of this course of action as she can be without instigating a fight.

His eyes are deep and sad and the familiar planes and angles of his hands feel oddly unrecognizable, like they had, somehow, become lost in translation.

"I will be back," he says kissing her forehead and Felicity closes her eyes and doesn't answer that she has heard those words before, she has believed those words before. She has since then learned that there are promises that are just too far out of their reach to fulfill.

Felicity walks at night across the city grabbing her purse like it's what keeps her from falling to the abyss. She concentrates on walking, on taking one step after another, she focuses on breathing evenly although she feels on the verge of… something.

Her therapist would have probably something helpful and insightful to say. If she had a therapist. If she could actually go to a professional and talk freely about her fears and her anxieties without compromising the secrets and lives of… pretty much everyone she cares about, so she doesn't have a therapist, she has code and computers and work.

And Ray.

Somehow she has Ray. Ray that pursues her without reserves, listens to her and takes her opinion into consideration.

There is always another choice.

The thing with Ray is that — well, it was supposed to be easy-going. No high-speed car chases at night or jumping out of buildings followed by a group of professional criminals, no secret identities or top secret issues to protect. It was supposed to be easy and kind of normal, but as it turns out, it is not.

She has to juggle her work with a boyfriend with a secret identity that doesn't know the secret identity of the people she collaborates with most nights which could be considered as one fine definition of complicated.

Ray starts to sneak out at night to test the suit and Felicity can't help to feel the uneasiness that comes with having your very untrained boyfriend setting his mind into fighting crime. She feels anxious and worried and nothing that could be remotely related to _easy-going_.

Ray comes back to the lab and takes the helmet of the suit off. His hair is messy and a little damp from the sweat, with his smile worthy of a toothpaste commercial, and his happy eyes.

"I think I am really getting the hang out of it. Today I've been able to chase a guy into an alley after a 90 degrees turn without actually stomping on anything. I think it deserve a toast."

She tries to smile but it doesn't reach her eyes. "I'm not really in the mood."

Ray frowns and gets closer to her, like the perspective of her not celebrating that he hasn't hit a wall at high speed is somehow preposterous.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong." She tries her best to sound convincing. "It's just that maybe you should take things with the suit slower."

Or not to take them at all. That would be perfectly fine too.

"Why?"

"Why? Because flying out on a highly untested suit is dangerous enough as it is without adding chasing criminals to it."

He makes a face, a mix of disappointment and desperation and Felicity has to fight the urge to punch him in the face.

"We've talked about this and I thought you understood. I am not going to stop."

She feels a little betrayed by his words, like she is somehow the irrational party, the spoilsport that admonishes vigilante boys for being reckless. She should have never helped him with the suit but she was still devastated for losing Sara and shaken at the aftermath of Oliver's decision. Ray and the suits were there, within reach of her hands and she didn't know what else to do.

"I didn't say anything about stopping but maybe..."

"No." He says and his negative echoes in the room. "Besides, I'm not the only one doing this out there."

She has flashes of Oliver with a bullet in his body bleeding on the backseat of her car, of Laurel completely beaten up, of Roy pulling an arrow out of his tight, of Diggle's side covered in stitches after a bad encounter with a knife and wonders if Ray would be able to stand a chance on a real fight.

"I don't think comparing yourself to the Arrow is neither a good nor a realistic idea."

He nods eagerly. "No, no you are right. I'm not a criminal. Besides I have something in my favour that would make me better than him and he will never have."

And she hopes is some kind of secret weapon that could be compared with kryptonite because she is not sure she could ever get over it if something happened to him after helping him out to get the suit ready and flying.

"And what is that?"

He smiles brightly and put his hand still dressed up in the suit over her shoulder. "Your help, of course!"

"Of course," she mumbles, and the sudden knot formed around her throat almost doesn't allow her to breathe at all.

In the span of three days, Felicity's life turns itself upside down once again. Thea Queen dies in the sterile ICU room of Starling City Hospital hours after Roy fakes his own death and leaves the city and the fact that they all fly to Nanda Parbat to exchange the life of one Queen for another takes the last drop of her good reasoning and mental sanity. It's the only explanation she has for stepping up to Ra's Al Ghul demanding a satisfactory resolution.

When she heads for Oliver's room she is not thinking of saying goodbye. She is maybe not even thinking at all, the only thing that Felicity has in mind is getting Oliver to agree to go back with them to Starling City. The drug is a desperate last minute plan. The sex, a combination of something that's been a long time coming and the classy-brothel decoration. And maybe a little bit of desperation too.

Anyway, it doesn't work. Not the drug, not the sex, not even the pleading and praying to unknown gods. She goes back to Starling city and the fact that when she returns the jet to Ray she barely remembers him breaking up with her should be enough of a sign that she's undergoing some kind of emotional crisis.

Perhaps her father was right after all. Perhaps there are times when you really don't have any other choice.

Felicity cries herself to exhaustion and works till she can't keep her eyes open anymore and when neither of those classic coping techniques work she decides that the city and the impending apocalypse menacing them all better suck it up because she need a night off and an obscene amount of alcohol if she wants to have any chance at all of processing the recent developments.

This is how she finds herself sitting in the rug of her sitting room with her back pressed against her sofa for support, an open bottle of wine resting on the coffee table as Lyla pours her another glass.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She asks, her voice gentle and kind.

Felicity sighs and negates with an abrupt movement of her head. "I think I need more wine for that." More wine than the city can procure, probably.

On the sofa Laurel sighs, kind of sad, kind of resigned, with her glass of blueberry juice in her hand as Nyssa, nowhere to be seen, inspects her apartment for the first time. She would have invited Thea too but she fled after Felicity gave her the details of Roy's new whereabouts. And maybe this would make it all harder for her.

She is not sure.

In any case, opened bottles of red wine wait for no woman.

"Are you sure Nyssa is alright?" she asks Laurel with some hesitation because there isn't a polite way to ask someone if her friend has the intent to kill them all.

Laurel smiles with sweet understanding in her eyes and Felicity wonders if this soft side of her is the remains of her past self or the hidden side effects of the person he has become now. "Yes. And she is grateful you extended the invitation to her."

"Yes," Nyssa says making her sudden appearance out of a shadow that Felicity could swear wasn't there before.

It is a marvel that they all fit together like this because although she is grateful for being on the good graces of these wonderful, deadly women there is no mistake in her mind that this is what the aftermath of men's decisions looks like. They have not chosen each other, not really. They have been thrown into each other paths and they have made the best of a less than ideal situation; they have reached to each other and offered support instead of just licking their wounds of resentment and moving on.

Felicity sighs again and empties her glass in a couple of gulps and then empties another glass in quick succession until her head buzzes with the promise of oblivion and the hope that the sadness within herself becomes less of an oppressing force against her lungs.

"So how are things with you and Ray?" Lyla asks in a failed attempt to lighten the mood. "Still going hard with the stalking tendencies?"

She should say that Ray and her are over, but she doesn't because talking about Ray has always been far easier than talking about other things, so instead she groans and throws her head back. " _Stalking tendencies_ is a bit too harsh." After all she is the one that manages to over-talk in any social situation ever imagined, not exactly cast-the-first-stone material.

"The guy bought your workplace. Take it from a professional litigator, buying your workplace is as stalkery as it gets. Classier than your average stalker I'll grant you, but just as creepy."

Nyssa makes a disapproving kind of noise as she slowly takes a seat by her side on the rug. "Do you want me to take care of him?"

She looks around and sees the faces of these women, full of seriousness and intent, all capable of set justice for themselves if they seem it fit. " _God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men_." It's what comes to her mind, and for all she knows he did and she skipped the line somehow.

"No! Nonononononono. No taking care of needed. Thank you, thought." Nyssa seems to physically relax and Felicity releases a breath she didn't know she had been holding. "I'll admit that his approach is... improvable but he is not a psychopath, he is just awkward."

Laurel, chuckles like that is the understatement of the year and Felicity figures that maybe she is drunk enough for this kind of conversation.

"No really, he is okay. He is more than okay actually." There is a little voice inside herself insisting that this need for validation for a broken relationship is not such a good sign but she tries hard to ignore it. "He is the CEO of a very lucrative company. He is rich and handsome and he does work out, as in climbing that salmon ladder thing you all like so much." Lyla looks at her with a condescending kind of stare that Felicity interprets as incredulity and that prompts her to keep going when she obviously should just shut up. "And he is kind of a vigilante too, with the ATOM suit and everything."

Lyla rolls her eyes and pours more wine for the both of them, Laurel sighs and Nyssa doesn't move as she seems to be plotting someone's death, hopefully not inside this room.

"Are you aware that you just sort of described—"

She doesn't let Laurel finish the sentence. "Oliver's Disney version. Yes, I'm uncomfortably aware," she says, her words slurring as evidence of her current state of inebriation.

"I was going to say _civilized version_ , but sure, have it your way."

"He has lighter baggage," she sounds a little resentful , a little bitter for her usual colour of voice but she doesn't try to put an end to this conversation because then she would have to talk about Oliver, about Nanda Parbat, about losing him after a year of constantly losing him. She really doesn't want to face that conversation, at least not yet, maybe not ever.

This time is Lyla turn to sigh. "Sweetie, almost everybody has lighter baggage than _us_."

Felicity realizes several things all at once in that very moment:

One. That she cringes and frowns when someone calls her Sweetie. It is demeaning and misogynistic but somehow when Lyla does it, it feels oddly comforting, like the embarrassing pet name coming from a sister. Or so she assumes.

Two. That there is an _us_. That she is a past of this _us_ now. Somehow along the way she has become a non-kicking, non-punching permanent fix to the whole mess that is the lives of these people and although she has known that for quite sometime she always had assumed that the others considered her more of a convenient outsider and less of an _us_.

And Three. That Ray's baggage seeming lighter and a credit to himself is just a reflection of the craziness, absolute craziness her life has become.

"It doesn't matter anyway, Ray and I broke up," she says finally.

"Oh Sweetie, what happened?" asks Lyla.

"Has he misbehaved?" asks Nyssa in a very, very threatening way.

"No. No! It's just me." The words start to feel difficult in her lips, like pronunciation is a very hard thing for normal functional adult to do. "I think I have issues. Vigilante's issues" Oliver's issues, she doesn't say. "I mean, look at my life for the last three years! I've been kissed by Barry, Sara, Oliver and Ray. All vigilantes with secret identities and stuff and all have left me one way or the other. I'm like the doomed version of that girlfriend Ross had that only dated Nobel Prize's winners."

Her reasoning is barely coherent at this point but her slurred and distorted words make Lyla and Laurel laugh softly as Nyssa seems to just contemplate her with casual disinterest and a complete lack of understanding of the pop culture reference. Of course it's not like Felicity really though that Nyssa would be a big _Friends_ fan because probably in the Land of All Assassin's things all non lethal distractions must be forbidden and forgotten, but for a moment her drunken mind gets stuck with the image of a group of very serious Assassins sitting around a tv and throwing popcorn and the screen every time Ross recites the always annoying "we were on a break" and she can't stop laughing.

"So you kissed Sara," says Nyssa out of the blue and her words are like a sharp knife cutting the lighter mood as a sudden silence falls over the room.

"No. No. No," she says with emphatic movements of her head and wonders if the neutral, blank stare that Nyssa directs at her means that she is thinking about inflicting her the pain of seven hells. "Sara kissed me but not as in really _kissing_ , it was more of a non-kiss kiss. Life a shut-up-already kiss — I'd know I had my fair dose of those along the years — and Sara was nice, like really nice and she probably didn't want to strangle me but I have this tendency to talk way too much when I get nervous and—"

Without any other warning Nyssa leans in and effectively process to shut her up by chastely kissing her on the lips.

"You do talk too much," she says and Felicity is suddenly too unsettled to do anything more than to blink twice and update the amount of kind-of-vigilantes that she has kissed her in recent years.

"Great. I'm officially on a roll."

What the inexistent, unofficial guide of the gruff vigilante and the problematic sidekick doesn't tell you is that life doesn't stop to accommodate any sacrosanct mission. No time for returning mom's calls or running errands, no place for demanding explanations and discussing feelings on the verge of an Ra's Al Ghul shaped Apocalypse. So as all Hell breaks loose over Starling City — yet again — Felicity postpones her inconvenient rage and trust issues until the fight is over and they have managed to save the day and survive to tell the tale.

"I want to be with you," Oliver says in front of every person that counts in their kind of new lair at Palmer Industries and the sudden rush of unexpected joy is so intoxicating that she forgets that she has things to say to him. Important things. Like no more plans involving sabotaging a plane you are going to flight in.

That is why when they both go to her apartment to retrieve a suitcase and some clothes for very well deserved vacation time, Oliver ends up sitting on the couch, observant, his hands patiently entangled as his forearms rest on his knees as she paces the rug up and down trying to set some ground rules.

"No more plans involving sabotaging a plane you are going to fly in," she says for starters because well, it seems kind of obvious but as it turns out, it is actually not.

"Okay."

"And definitely no more _I can't be with you because they will use you to hurt me_."

Oliver makes a face, like he really doesn't want to compromise on that and some of her buried anger starts to flare up again.

"I'm no longer the Arrow."

Felicity glares at him. She is not going to fall for that one. "For now."

"Felicity, I—"

"I'm serious Oliver, I'm a big girl. Besides at this point it's rather ludicrous," she rambles and paces and gesticulates with her hands in frustration. "I don't mean to brag but the amount of secrets I'm familiar with at the moment is so absurd that if someone kidnapped me to get a secret identity I would need clarification, like are we talking The Arrow, The Flash, The Black Canary, Batman..?"

"Wait, you know Batman's secret identity?."

She stops on her tracks for a moment because, really? That was absolutely not the key part of the conversation.

"It is a long story." One involving a Palmer Industries meeting in Gotham and her hacking some secure line out of pure curiosity and boredom. "And it was an accident. I wasn't actually trying to figure out who Batman is."

Oliver gapes at her with a smile that reaches his eyes and Felicity almost forgets that she is really mad at him. "Oliver?"

He gets up and in two long, graceful steps he is in front of her, caressing the sides of her jaw with his hands. "You are amazing," he declares kissing her.

In this closeness, as he gently kisses her devouring her mouth slowly, the smell of him is just too present, that smell of warm, clean sheets that always made her feel… something. The same smell he had in Nanda Parbat as he put them in a cell and let them believe that he was going to kill them. She lets the betrayal and hurt she felt then filter into the kiss, with angry bites at his soft lips, with merciless thrusts of her tongue.

When she breaks the kiss there is a little smile on his face that infuriates her enough to shove his shirt up ungraciously, making him walk backwards as she advances.

"No more lying to me, not even for my own good," she says when the back of his knees hits the couch, pushing him so he sits on it without much finesse.

"No more lying," he agrees with a voice soft and low.

Felicity sits across his lap and takes his shirt off, her knees framing his hips as she aggressively kisses him again, all tongue and teeth and not so gentle lips. Her hands roams over the uneven skin of his chest as he caresses her back over the uncomfortable fabric of her top and she follows the lines and planes of his taut muscles until she reaches the first button of his jeans. Oliver groans into her mouth as she keeps unbuttoning his pants.

She stands up before he can help her undress and starts to take her own pants down as Oliver kicks his off.

"No more telling Thea or Laurel or me what we can or can't do." Her voice is a little unsteady but commanding as they both take their underwear off.

Oliver nods and groans as she regains her earlier position. Felicity lets him take her top and her bra off, with soft open-mouthed kisses and reverent touches but this is not what it is about, this is not an act of desperate goodbye or shy beginnings. This is working things out and setting the record straight so she leads his hands to her buttocks as she bites the skin where his neck and his left shoulder converge, she bites hard enough to mark him as she rotates her hips in blatant provocation.

Oliver growls and the rumble of his chest echoes in all her body as he grabs her ass with eagerness and presses her closer to him.

She positions herself and takes him in without more preambles or foreplay; she is been ready, bothered and angry since what feels like forever and as they both come together there's a hiss and a sigh and Felicity swears she couldn't tell which is hers and which is his.

"And you have to—" It's starting to get hard to think clearly as she moves with a frantic rhythm and he dodges and makes room to take one of her breasts in his mouth — "you have to make things right by Nyssa."

Because forcing a woman into marrying? Really high on her list of no-no's, more so if it's outside her sexual orientation to add insult to injury.

"Felicity?" Oliver's voice sounds serious and strained as he releases her breast to look at her in the eyes as he accompanies the movement of her hips with his hands on her backside.

"Yeah?"

"No talking about other women during sex."

She would laugh if she wasn't so close to orgasm that she feels like she is going to break from the inside out. "Yeah, yeah, okay."

She comes hard, fast and dirty, her open mouth next to his ear and her hands gripping the muscles of his upper arms for leverage with Oliver dutifully following her a couple of minutes after. They stay like this, naked, sweaty and panting, a jumble of limbs and lips as they try to regain their breathing and some resemblance of composure.

Oliver lazily starts to caress her arms and her back and she can't find within herself enough pieces of her previous feelings of anger and betrayal to put the emotions back together.

"Good argument," she says against his chest.

His laugh comes like a sudden storm completely charged with electricity. "Well, if that was arguing with you I think we've been doing it wrong for the last three years."

She punches him lightly and lets him carry her to the bedroom. They are supposed to be resting, they have a whole new life to build up in the morning.


	4. A short epilogue of you and me

The road finally leads them to New Orleans. The city is old and new at the same time; rich in a way that goes beyond money and it's difficult to put into words. It is early September. Mystery and jazz can be smelled in the air and Felicity falls irremediably in love with the French Quarter on a lazy sunny afternoon.

Oliver can see it in her eyes, bright and wide and filled with all the good kinds of excitement. They travel on a budget and she has early on imposed a strict no-luxuries-policy that includes avoiding mayor tourism sightings, nevertheless, he has managed to convince her to go to the Royal Cafe; he will gladly pay the over-price after seeing the reaction on her face.

"You love it here," he says as he watches her trying to take her surroundings in.

They are seated on a cosy little table near the window. He holds her hand over the creamy tablecloth and entangles their fingers, caressing the back of her hand with his thumb.

"It is-" she begins but her mouth falls adorably open as another new thing catches her attention. "I have never been in a place like this. It's so different from Las Vegas or Starling City." She looks back at him finally, smiling. Her clear blue eyes fixed on his. "I've never travelled much. When I was in college I had no money. Then I started working and I never seemed to have enough time and more recently there was always too much going on."

There is a longing in her words that Oliver wishes he could take away, give to her what he remembers of the wasted year he irresponsibly spent partying with Tommy through South America after his first year of college, or some of those unappreciated family trips to exotic places that always seemed too boring for his taste.

"Where would you like to go?"

She snorts like the question is far too obvious. "Anywhere. Everywhere."

There is a certain assertiveness in her voice that it is mesmerizing. He texts Thea in between starters and buys the plane tickets before dessert.

"Let's go," he says just as they pay the check, grabbing her hand and dragging her out to the street. The sky is already dark and Felicity's laugh echoes in the corners of colonial landmarks. "We have a plane to catch," he declares.

She stops on her feet, confused but smiling. Her hair is loose and a slight rush of wind sends it and the skirt of her yellow sundress flying in the air.

"A plane? Where to?"

He smiles. His hands automatically take their rightful place on her waist and he leans to properly kiss her in the middle of the street, her lips familiar and new all at once.

"Anywhere. Everywhere," he says.

They land on a small airport near Milan with little more baggage than their passports, some credit cards and as many clothes as they could fit into their brand new backpacks.

They have no plan, no roadmap, they just explore the country hand in hand at their own pace catching trains and picking up rental cars that leads them to the Amalfi coast and Sorrento, to the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculano, enjoying the food and the wine until the roads stop being italian and start belonging to France.

They walk through Toulouse and Carcassone and if Oliver wasn't stupidly in love with her already he would have fallen hard and fast just watching her face as she sees the modernist buildings of Barcelona for the first time.

"I can't believe this. I'm backpacking through Europe, I have actually kind of hiked the mount Tibidabo and what do I find?"

The baffled tone in her voice would make him smirk if it wasn't because he takes the preventive measurements of biting his lower lip.

"Lots of tourists?"

"Lots of tourists! And the tiniest amusement park ever seen!" She looks around herself and finally sets her eyes on him with her lids half-closed accusingly. "No secluded, romantic lake anywhere. I feel like everything I thought I knew is a lie."

He pulls her closer and kisses the top her head.

"Is this about that episode of Friends you made me watch last night?"

"I'm not ready to talk about it yet," she says against his t-shirt, her slender fingers trespassing under the hem to caress the little of his back with just the tip of her nails. The warmth spreading through his insides has little to do with the unforgiving Spanish sun.

Greece turns out to be too sunny and too dry for her licking which, coming from a Las Vegas girl is quite rich, but the islands agree with her; her loose hair twirls and turns in exuberant waves due to the salted water of the sea and the air of the old Mediterranean Sea tans her skin ever so slightly. He is not a big fan of islands but he could learn to over it here

They get to walk among the remains of ancient empires and make love in isolated beaches of solid rock instead of sand before the poor wi-fi connection epidemic that seems to suffer most of the country finally gets on her nerves.

The next few days feels like weeks, months, years. They visit cities and cross borders with celerity as they travel through Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia…

"This is ridiculous. It seems like we need to procure our passports every fifteen minutes," Felicity whines are they make their way across the Austrian border. "It is been, how much since the last time? a hundred miles?"

Oliver knows her bad temper has little to do with the inconvenience of Custom's procedure and a lot with the poor breakfast they have had that morning so he smiles politely at the officer that is checking his documents and urges her gently to keep going.

"At least this time we don't have to change currency," Oliver says in a placating voice.

"Thank God for small miracles and Euro-zone!"

By the time they reach the north of Germany the days are short and the temperature drops fast as the sun leaves the sky but Oliver isn't going to complain, the uninviting weather making it easy to spent long hours in bed under its warm blankets, kissing lazily as the rain hits the bedroom windows.

Russia is nothing like he remembered it. It's kinder and less violent with Felicity by her side. They get to catch the trans-Siberian train and avoid all the kind of troubles that two North American tourists could inadvertently get into.

Oliver talks to some locals and casually drops a couple of pinpoints names and they manage to cheaply rent a little apartment near downtown in Vladivostok for a couple of nights.

Winter days are now close ahead and Felicity has long since changed the colourful tank tops that showed her lightly tanned skin for sweaters, coats and thick clothes that now lay in disarray on the floor.

"Last time we were in Russia you made some poor judgement calls," she says in a whisper, her lips caressing the shell of his ear before lightly biting it.

He shudders, his hands full of naked skin as he carries her to the bed.

"I like to think that I've learned a thing or two since then," he answers in between kissing her throat.

It is satisfactorily easy to banter with her now, to react at her comebacks and point out her unintentional double entendres with a knowing smirk. Felicity presses her body against his, their limbs entangled under the sheets as they indulge in lazy kisses and touches.

It feels like they have all the time in the world at their disposal.

If crossing from Russia to China with an American passport is a little too suspicious their own good, the soldiers for the border are prone to overlook it in exchange for the right amount of American dollars. A little of sweet talk and a couple of smiles and they make it into the country hand in hand without being troubled furthermore.

"What did you say to them?"

"Oh, nothing, just a couple of compliments to their good work and loyalty to the great nation of China."

Felicity makes a face, like suspects something is going on, her hand still warm and firm in his with their fingers interlaced as they walk away from the border "Are you sure?"

"That I said that? Yes, pretty sure."

Maybe not with those exact words but he has always been pretty bad at literal translations and as the old said goes, is the thought that counts.

"I mean, you picked up a weirdly amount of difficult to acquire skills in five years, maybe you don't know as much Chinese as you think you do," she half closes her lids for intent, ·maybe you just have inadvertently sold me for a pound of rice, that guy smiled at me pretty weirdly."

"I know Chinese," he reassures her.

"So what you are trying to imply is that if you'll sell me for a pound of rice, it wouldn't be unintentional?" she teases.

"Yes," he teases back and she smiles so brightly that seems impossible that merely a year ago their lives were sunk in darkness.

He thought he could never leave it behind, that he would never be able to remember the person he was beneath the missions and the green leather suit, much less that he would be able to have something resembling of a life again but a gentle wind blows and he smells the subtle, sweet perfume of felicity by his side and it's the other path that seems impossible now.

Felicity leans on him playfully as she says "my mom used to warn me against guys like you."

For a couple of seconds he tries to figure out what kind of category that might be before giving up "Guys like me?" because he somehow doubts that Donna Smoak would have given any kind of advice to her young daughter regarding broken ex-vigilantes.

"Yeah; charming college dropouts," she says, "Multiple times."

"That was coincidentally also my nickname," he jokes.

Her laugh is loud and carefree like bad things never made a stain on her.

"Oh my God I can't believe you just made that terribly bad pun!"

"' _ _Terribly bad pun__ ', yes I think I've been called that too."

She punches him in the arm and laughs even harder if that is possible.

The call surprises them a week after setting foot in Shanghai. The information is a little confusing and the details far too complicated to explain over the phone but Felicity gathers that there has been some kind of accident involving Ray and she has somehow inherit the presidency of his company.

Felicity looks at him with her impossible blue eyes filled with unshed tears and apprehension and Oliver holds her, rocks her softly and tells her that everything will be find as he kisses the top of her head.

They buy two plane tickets that would carry them back to Starling City, so they pick up their passport and their wallets and leave pretty much everything else behind.

They have nothing to check in, nothing to hide and nothing to declare but go through the arduous process of airport security Felicity seems a little wary and a little too quiet for her normal self.

"Are you okay?"

"What? Yes," she says distracted, "I'm just a little anxious about going back home."

He nods in understanding although he doesn't share her anxiety. He feels raw and new and longing for things that have little to do with Starling City. He feels the sudden weight of missing his sister for several months and the intrinsic irritation of a long flight ahead.

They walk towards the boarding gate, her blonde hair standing out in the crowd, it's longer than he ever remembers seeing on her and for a moment he can't repress the urge to lift his hand and run his fingers through its softness.

They come to a stop, she turns and embraces his waist in a loose hold that allows her to look at him in the eyes "Do you think we will get bored?" she asks with apprehension.

"Bored? Of what?"

"Of normal life," her voice is barely over a whisper, "of us."

It seems preposterous to him. He has grown so used to her presence by his side that the mere thought of not wanting her there feels like not wanting air to fill in his lungs. He wonders briefly, if he could keep being this person that fills in his skin now without her in his life.

"I think at this point, for us a suburban routine is as an exotic experience as you can get."

She smiles and takes a deep breath. "Yeah, you are right."

"Besides, you can hack into high security databases, who can get bored of that?"

"Yes and you can order chinese in chinese, how is not that handy?"

The people rush around them as they keep immobile in this casual embrace that maybe could last a whole lifetime.

"I think you should move in with me, when we'll arrive home," her voice is soft and her eyes clear. She looks hopeful and happy and preposterously expectant so he leans in to kiss her with studied slowness, trying to show the emotions that will make his voice falter if he'd try to use words instead.

In the back pocket of his jeans there is an engagement ring he bought out of a whim in Ambers that threatens to burn a hole in the fabric out of impatience to be used.


End file.
